I don’t actually know what irony means, but as a child of the ironic T-shirt generation — both the sO rAnDoM cartoon trend in elementary schoolwear (I mean, we were kids) and the gross Jam Rags era (not kids, no relation, good riddance) — I guess I’m as equipped as anyone to investigate the affliction.
For one, even googling “ironic T-shirts” produces a strange variety of results centered on diarrhea. After like, a thousand “irony (adj): the opposite of wrinkly” garments. Irony can be taken to mean funny-but-for-clothes. Only, with the caveat that they’re not funny, there has never been a funny shirt, wearing a joke on your body is never optimal.
(I’m bitter. You don’t know how many graphic tees I had to throw away, and how late.)
But in every non-textile arena, irony becomes harder to pin down. Pretty much no one but lit crit people uses it in the lit crit sense of “dramatic knowledge beyond the ken of characters in-fiction.” Subverison of expectation plays some kind of role: fully three quarters of the ironic T-shirts of yesterdecade feature some rejoinder about sarcasm.
Alex King wrote a truly incredible introduction to aesthetic irony in “Taco Bell and the Paradox of Ironic Appreciation.” She points out that irony does center on expectation, and namely it centers on our expectations about others based on “cultural class.” You might expect that, because someone wears cardigans and wire-frame glasses and brews coffee from a moka pot, they’d also enjoy small plate fare and black-and-white films about sad clowns. If they express a love of Butterfingers and Die Hard — or Taco Bell — you would be surprised.
No one wants to be surprising. Irony helps you cope with the question mark of how you come across to the world. What do they think of me? What do they expect of me? Am I lowering my social capital by liking something so… simple? Ironic appreciation allows someone to express love, while acknowledging that they are in fact above whatever it is they love. This is why you don’t hear of many people ironically liking The Turn of the Screw.
Lots about that bothers me. I’d link back to my argument against this kind of irony, but honestly just scroll through the blog. My whole genre is unironic appreciation — including Supernormal, which I will link. Let me draw just one gripe from my bag of gripes.
Do you think Taco Bell is simple food? Not that it’s gourmet, that’s different. I mean, can anyone imagine in good faith that Taco Bell is the ground floor of complexity in tacospace?
Your dream car, your dream house, your dream island — none of these come close to the price tag that Taco Bell has pinned on curating the experience of eating their product. Every element has been fine tuned by probably very well-paid food testers. Ditto soda. I’m remembering Malcolm Gladwell’s ketchup essay, a quote from sensory consulting bigwig Judy Heylmun: “The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous.”
Of course they are! The engine of scientific achievement has locomoted ceaselessly towards Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Taco Bell crunchy tacos! Everything led us to this moment!
What I’m not saying is that these things are culinarily good, or even complex in the sense of tasting notes. But they are extremely sophisticated and, in my opinion, elegant. They capture one thing extremely well.
Completely unironically loving corporate saltlicks and cookie jars, admittedly, takes this kind of appreciation too far. They buy your tastebuds. They know what substances, down to the molecule, pilot your brain through their grocery aisles. They know how addictive something can be before it gets regulated.
Love unironically, or not at all. Don’t dismiss simple things — it may even be wise to fear them.