Sarcasm Writ Large

sarcasm--pointed and exaggerated irony, intending to derail or deflect a status quo; a blistering overstatement of intentional underplay of a character's self-interest or agenda.

Arguably the most difficult emotion to convey in writing because of its heavy reliance on context, sarcasm found one of its most enduring modern spokespersons in Dorothy Parker. In a review of a book, she said, "This is not a book to be set aside lightly. It should be hurled across the room with great force."

Look at it this way:

The humorist pokes fun at himself.

The ironist pokes fun at the human condition.

The satirist is a moralist without the clerical collar.

The sarcasm maven wants to elevate his own status at the expense of yours.

Proceed accordingly.

A current sarcasm maven worth watching (because of his superb control) is Stephen Colbert. His targets are well articulated, his irony extends from verbal acuity to a perfected tone (see Dead pan delivery) and impeccable sense of timing. So deft is Mr. Colbert and, thus, worth study, that on many occasions even his targets of opportunity are convinced he is arguing on his side. Few persons are as repelled by his on-stage persona as they are by the persona and likes of Don Rickles.

Hint: Even if you find sarcasm attractive, spend some time crafting irony before you proceed into the print and digital worlds.

Concealed Humor?

deadpan--a form of narration or delivery in which a character relating opinions and material appears to be neutral and nonjudgmental; a means of conveying material bound to have some effect on the audience without betraying any hint of its implications or explosive nature.

Deadpan delivery is an enormous play on the role of the naive narrator, a pretense that what is being revealed is nothing out of the ordinary. One of the more legendary deadpan deliverers in American letters is Samuel Langhorn Clemens, who recast himself as the storyteller Mark Twain, and who used himself as an apparent butt in order to bring down sundry targets of his outrage. 

 Twain often affected the role of the bumpkin or, as he referred to himself in the title of one of his books, an innocent. (See The Innocents Abroad for a classic example of deadpan travel writing.) After achieving one or two laughs at his own expense, Twain strode forth, his overall intent becoming increasingly apparent (See the opening pages of his Christian Science).

Another style of deadpan writing is seen in the work of an individual whose life span extended a scant fifteen years beyond Twain's--Franz Kafka. His mordant settings were the backdrops for individuals who at first blush represent victims of conspiracy or repressive social mechanisms, extending into bureaucracies and families. 

 In some of his works (See The Trial), Kafka seemed to be saying that the individual had no choice, was at the mercy of whatever Fates happened to be in power at the moment, had no hope for raising his status. Seen as a deliberate invoker of the understated and a sly precursor to Woody Allen, Kafka and his work take on a richer meaning that a more literal reading would provide. Thus may Kafka be thought to join Twain as charter members of The Satirists' Club.

Yet another, more nuanced gloss on the deadpan approach to the release or revelation of dramatic material comes from the mind and pen of Steven Colbert, who often seems to provoke the support of his actual targets. 

 Like Twain and Kafka, Colbert can be experienced on a literal basis, from which a set of assumptions may be made. Thus each of these three deadpanners and all those who chose to provide individualized paths of their own are asking the reader to look under the surface for hidden intent. 

 Twain, Kafka, and Colbert arguably have mischievous senses of humor for those who look for the truly serious intent lurking beneath the apparent serious intent. Imagine the greater effect Ayn Rand would have enjoyed had she regulated her rant to the point where it became more deadpan.

Warning: one of the consequences of deadpan delivery, in live performance or in writing, is to limit the audience, and, in the case of the actor, Sasha Baron Cohen, who presented himself as the entity Borat, to not only limit the audience but as well to seriously offend it. Thus does deadpan as a prism of dispensing information become partners with irony, which by its own nature implies conspiracy (often of the sort Kafka write about), and irony's hard-to-manage cousin, sarcasm. Deadpan also relies heavily on a not-too distant relative, ambiguity, as in "What did the writer really mean?"

Don't forget: In many of the visual and performing arts, the intent of the composer is to disturb. Disturb from what? Disturb from complacency.

For extra credit: Read the opening two pages of Twain's Life on the Mississippi, his love letter to the great American river, which had captured so big a place in his heart. After reading those two pages with their straightforward sincerity and offering of statistics, can you say for an absolute certainty that Twain was dead serious and not having us on?

Cheek Lit

chick lit--a literary form intended for women and young girl readers; novels and short stories intended to appeal to feminine tastes and issues; a separate genre from romance, with the ultimate goal specifically not focusing on marriage.

Relatively speaking, chick lit is a new kid on the block, an equivalent for feminine readers of the adventure stories aimed at male readers. As adventure stories run the gamut in voice from a drill-sergeant gruffness to a knowledgeable attention to the details of engines, motors, calibers of bullets, and the specific terrains of bull rings, chick lit reflects a full-bore enjoyment of professionalism, fashions, dating, sexuality, and relationships in general. The chick lit voice strives for and often achieves a tone of humor, with all the edge and potential for pain and sad understanding that implies. In other cases, the chick lit protagonist tends to be self-effacing, but by no means embracing victimhood.

It is not so much a case of men being barred from writing chick lit as it is a case of the potential for a male writer of chick lit sounding a few degrees too ironic, which becomes sarcasm, which is no fun for anyone to read. Nor is it a case of chick lit being the emergence of revenge fantasy writ large for women writers; chick lit is an emerged attitude about the conditions and problems of life that follow women about as though they were stalkers.

The works of Candace Bushnell are apt targets for studiers of chick lit, and although it is nonfiction, the works of Maureen Dowd are excellent study guides for what not to do when writing chick lit.

On balance, chick lit may be thought of as serious literature for readers and writers, which means its endings are of a piece with Thelma and Louise and, to mix the gender metaphor, of Huck Finn taking off for the territory ahead, fleeing from civilization. Some endings of chick lit novels are happy in the plausible sense. Others are reminiscent of Yossarian in Catch-22, taking off in a small boat for Sweden, hoping to flee the consummate madness that is war.

As with all emerging genera, chick lit is pushing envelopes of convention. To write it, the writer must remain abreast of the tide.

Satire: Read It and Woop

satire--a form of ridicule in which an individual, institution, attitude, or work of academic and/or historical intent has fun made of it and is as well accompanied by some suggestion for solving the occasion of ridicule. Like its brother and sister aspects of humor, satire is highly moral in its reach, sparing no feelings in its path to the target, its intended goals a deflation of pomposity and an indicated pathway to better behavior. For writers, satire is an ideal approach to ridiculing prevalent culture, behavior, institutions, and individuals, using exaggeration as a primary tool. A risk of satire is the potential for offense taken by the target, offense that may easily lead to outrage. Notable historical examples are Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," which caused a wave of outrage after Swift, a clergyman, suggested a solution for the results of the famine caused by the Irish potato blight. In his still-readable Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais made fun, among other things, of the body politic by portraying large, overweight judges and politicians, who ate until they exploded. More recent satires are George Orwell's Animal Farm, 1984, and "Shooting an Elephant," in which he satirized various aspects of government.

Beyond the obvious dangers of inciting advocates of the very thing being satirized and their subsequent consequences is the danger of exaggerating too much, causing the entire readership to revolt, thus a good place for satire to stop at is somewhere beyond the boundaries of "This has gone too far." Satire, by its very nature, does go too far in its attempts to call attention to the thing or person being satirized. Joseph Heller went too far in Catch-22, but it was a well controlled too far, which is to say it went slightly beyond probability but it did not become sarcastic nor uncivil, nor did it have to. Sarcasm is one of the most difficult emotional registers to capture on paper; sarcasm-driven satire quickly loses its edge and thus its effect.

Although dead for nearly a hundred years, Mark Twain's satire merits study for its tone, neither too sarcastic nor outraged, his intent residing instead in his examples and uses of comparison. His essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is a must for writers because it so competently takes its target to task while providing valuable literary commentary simultaneously. Twain is also worth study because his satire is so often delivered dead-pan, seemingly without expression. The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It remain two text books for those who would satirize. Understatement and low-key presentation are two qualities inherent in effective satire, the goal being to convince the reader that the material presented is accurate and plausible. No subject or institution is immune to satire, as the newspaper and web site, The Onion, demonstrates. The most effective satires are those that sound so reasoned and apparently well thought out as to seem entirely plausible, which has the added effect of the target not knowing it has been attacked.

In addition to being highly effective when done well, satire is also a volatile commodity which will bite the hand that fed it, which is to say it will produce the unintended result of satirizing and bringing down the satirizer.



don't go there--a response by an individual in real life or a reply from a character within a story when pressed for the details and/or consequences of a painful, potentially humiliating situation. Both instances are meant to stop further questioning. When a writer confronts the Don't go there assertion, the writer needs to pursue full on, recording the results.

power--a condition or situation of authority or supremacy enjoyed by one character over another or group of others; a hierarchy of supervisory or accountability status. To some degree, power is evident in every scene; the characters may or may not be aware of the circumstances but the chances are that the reader will intuit the ranking situation. Thus even among two high school friends, the potential for an actual or imagined status difference exists. Employers hold a certain amount of power over employees, and romantic relationships frequently reflect some power basis, which the writer is wise to keep in mind, whether the status is alluded to or not.

Sometimes in dramatic narrative, the base of power is reversed; one character learns something or experiences insights which levels the playing fields of the authority or extent of the hold. Now the character who has been set free has the option to behave differently than his customary behavior. Roles have been shifted. One way or another, the dramatic action is different.

Some Notes on Happy Endings

Happiness is like sleep; we expect a certain amount of each in our daily life, we become cranky, even depressed if either is withheld for too long. Being in either state contains no guarantee that the condition will endure: a dog barking, a cat jumping up on one's chest, a sudden unanticipated noise will cause a sleeping person to awaken; a refusal of any sort, a disconnected day of writing, a warning note from one's bank will cause a happy person to shift gears.

Often associated with achieving one's ambitions relating to security, romantic, and artistic adventure, happiness becomes more complex with age, often extending its protective umbrella to members of one's clan, one's friends, perhaps even one's students if students are part of the equation. Happiness ultimately becomes a potential warning for the equivalent of what has happened in recent years to New Orleans and Galveston. From so much happiness, an old, cynical warning advises, can only come tragedy. Tolstoy thought so little of happiness as a dramatic state that he lumped persons enjoying it as being all alike. You want story, he seemed to be saying, you look at the permutations within the ranks of the losers, those who were but no longer are happy. Camus, on the other hand, posited that Sisyphus, the doomed eternal rock star, was a happy man.

Happiness has many landing strips. Individuals wandering about the streets, their iPods delivering music or podcasts to their ears, seem to be on the verge of if not completely resident in a form of happiness. Runners splashing through rain-pelted streets appear happy just as bird watchers, spying an egret or heron seem happy enough. Diners in a range of restaurants often have the look of happiness through satiety of well-prepared victuals, sippers in coffee houses have the unglazed look of being at one with the universe, and Buddhist monks, caught up in prayerful chant, have the transcendent look of having moved beyond time, space, and causation. A fine artist or ceramicist has the unique pulse of happiness at the completion of a work. Before the tidal lapse into post-coital tristesse, lovers experience the pleasure of having unwrapped a glorious present. A chef, placing the garnish of parsley on a dish, has the ratification of inner warmth. Happiness arrives like an unexpected guest, with advance waves of timidity. Happiness sneaks in like a crafty burglar. Happiness comes with fanfare and hoopla. It leaves sometimes without leaving a thank-you note; it departs over the wrong tone in which one word was uttered. It nudges you in the ribs with an over-the-top reminder that you have never been this happy before nor are you likely to be again.

In some sects of Buddhism, it is seen with as much suspicion as the concept of God. Sometimes you are so happy as to realize the disparity between this moment and the entirety of your life to date. Happiness in some of its avatars is like the realization that your mate of choice is bi-polar or bi-sexual or both. You write to experience and define happiness, during the course of which you may or may not point to the happy ending as your pole star. Happiness informs what you read, whom you read, and when. If you believe you have experienced much happiness in your life to date, you may not have a sense of humor, confusing your cheerful nature with your optimism, which can and does produce laughter.

Like happiness, sleep is not always easily come by. You may ingest substances to lure it forth, may indulge yoga breathing, replay happy moments the way you reread favored poems or stories. Like happiness, sleep may come when you least expect it or do not wish it. Like happiness, sleep is an healthy alternative to boredom; each replenishes you, expands you. Coming forth from sessions of either is a steroidal entry into the day of choices, decisions, actions, behavior toward others. Telling someone you love, Sweet dreams, is urging them to experience happiness and sleep at the same time, a splendid twofer. Telling someone with whom you have issues, Sweet dreams, is attaching the rapier thrust of irony, sarcasm; the same words with one of the more malevolent intents in the tool kit.

One of the joys of sleep is the opportunity to send responsibility on a vacation. Things visualized in sleep that you allow yourself to remember become wish lists of intent. These intentions may be sought after without modification or they may serve as an index of behavior to be governed by your awareness of convention. Another joy of sleep is to use it as a vehicle to pursue stories, scenarios of your creation, journeys to be taken without the frustrating delays at airports, where baggage and happiness are rifled, often misdirected.

Like sleep, happiness has some kind of ending. Happiness with other humans and with animals has endings. Sleep allows us the opportunity to revisit some of our endings, to recall the nuances of those endings, to prise out of those nuances an index of how, at this remove, we still care.

As writers, we take a daily vote on how happy our endings will be and what efforts will be necessary to make them plausible.

Funny You Say That: Irony in America

Irony is the stage manager in most human drama. It is the genome of crossed purposes, misinterpretation, and expressions of feelings other than those actually felt. It is someone saying, I'm doing all right but conveying that the individual is doing anything but all right.

In its way irony in literature and drama means a conspiracy between the reader and the writer, directed against one or more characters.

Yossarian, the main dramatic focus in Joe Heller's remarkable Catch-22, discovers early on the irony of the system against him, by which men in the armed forces are kept in combat because, having served the requisite combat time, they want to go home, which is a sign of sanity, which means they are fit for more combat.

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen begins with the ironic, "It is a truth universally recognized that a young man in possession of a good fortune must be in search of a wife." Righe, except it is no such thing; a wealthy young man is looking--well. let's say he's looking, but not necessarily for a wife.

It is considered irony when two persons believe they understand each other but in fact do not, leading to the drama of discovery. It is definitely irony when a person says something which will be interpreted by its opposite degree, thus I couldn't agree with you more becomes, You've got to be kidding!

One of the many great exercises actors use as a part of their training is to express emotion about something without mentioning the something by name, thus a character in a shaky romantic relationship might go on at some length about how poorly constructed new cars are, how they don't hold together the way they used to, how tenuous everything is.

If controlled, used carefully without too much piling on of effect, irony is a perfect tool for social commentary. I hate to tell you this, properly used becomes I couldn't wait to be the first to give you this lousy news, You could have fooled me becomes I knew it all the time. Of course I knew it all the time could easily become You could have fooled me.

When irony is not used with restraint, when it is overdone, it becomes sarcasm, which by all accounts is the most difficult emotional tone to convey, which should serve as a warning not to overdo irony.

Funny you should say that.

Irony is often spoken of as a capstone of American writing, but this can be an understatement (which in itself is a form of irony) and thus irony is a major essential of dramatic writing, reaching out to hold hands with ambiguity, which is simply not telling or explaining too much (so that irony, like quantum physics, can get to work on your story).

Funny you should say that, too.

So then, is irony funny?

Depends on who's point of view you're taking.