No.114765[Reply]
People say they're sick of irony, but what I think they're actually sick of is people using the guise of it as a shield for social and intellectual cowardice.
When someone says "awesome" to bad news, they obviously mean the opposite and are just being funny. A statement like "The Room is the greatest movie of all time" is a bit more ambiguous, but you can still infer that they're probably joking.
The problems come in when you start using the general shape of irony to make statements that aren't actually ironic. You're intentionally muddying your point to give yourself an easy out; you're joking, unless people start agreeing with you, at which point your 'ironic' statement starts revealing itself more and more as sincere, although it's still phrased kind of jokingly, because you want to maintain a level of plausible deniability in case you say something people don't like. It's an okay-ish way of making yourself look good in an argument, I suppose, at least in the short term, but it's anathema to any actual communication; to sharing ideas with others and seeing how they respond to them.
I was thinking about this because I myself use real irony all the time. When I hear bad news I'll say "wonderful"; when someone tells me an embarrassing story I'll say "that rocks". But I have, to my knowledge, never used pseudo-irony, and I couldn't quite articulate why it bothered me until now.
4 posts and 2 image replies omitted. Click reply to view. No.114772
Notto disu shitto agen....
Okay, so verbal irony is one of those odd human things where they say one thing but actually mean the opposite. You infer that it means the opposite of what it's literally saying via context, as you said, and often intonation is a big contributor. In something like socratic irony, the speaker pretends to be ignorant, but is actually knowledgeable and just feigns retardation to draw the other person out and rebuke them.
Sarcasm is specifically a form of negative language that overwhelmingly employs irony, but it's much more narrow in scope.
I know people don't like this kind of terminology, but this
>using the general shape of irony to make statements that aren't actually ironic
we can call post-irony. Why is it -post? Because it intentionally uses the cues that would normally mark something as ironic, while at the same time NOT meaning the opposite of what they're saying.
Irony is already often ambiguous, because you have to figure out if it matches the context or not, and so people with weaker social skills like autists tend to miss the point. But post-irony is designed to be ambiguous, everyone finds it harder to figure out, and that's on purpose. That's the term you're looking for.
No.114773
>>114771>When people say they're sick of irony, what they are referring to is how some communities get to the point where it seems they lose the ability to find anything fun in its own right, instead getting all their laughs via their disdain of how other people do. It's basically the evolution of cringe culture, in which people got entertainment from more directly mocking other people's forms of entertainment.I think this is accurate, and I'd go a step further and say that a lot of the time, once it goes on long enough, communities end up getting mad at their own caricature of their "opponent" group rather than anything that group actually say or does.
No.114800
>>114773I always think of the 'le' meme, which existed in [s4s] ironic form for significantly longer than it did reddit sincerity.
No.114822
>>114800On topic sager...
Anyways yeah, [s4s] is weird when it comes to meme culture, like they'll hold onto a meme for so long.
Like "le jack ruselel"