I have not thought about Aimee Terese for one second, when writing this, and blank sarcasm is a universal problem. And for your entirely unearned tone, I'm banning you. Do not come to my house and presume to lecture me, particularly in a way that demonstrates what a very online loser to truly are.
" I don’t know what the absolute fuck anyone is saying anymore because they are so terrified of just saying “I feel this, and it matters to me.”"
Man, a-fuckin-men. Irony isn't bad, as such, and used in appropriate proportions its fine. It's funny and can be used insightfully. But everything and everyonw these days is dripping in so many layers of irony it frequently takes me quite a while just to unwrap what the fuck they are even trying to say. That's if they were even trying to say anything at all.
I appreciate you highlighting how dumb the hipster irony vs “New Sincerity” binary is. Such simplistic thinking.
It’s also a serious debasing of the infinite range of irony. Why is the only option a sneering I-hate-everything blank faced internet irony? Why not a generous irony? Or a gentle one? Or a grim and sophisticated one? So much is more possible!
In my friend group, people often joke that I'm an scheming comic book supervillain. I have a very dark sense of humor, and in most games I play, I tend towards high-risk, high-reward playstyles that either succeed spectacularly, or fail spectacularly. They know I'm actually a decent, humble person, which makes the contrast to my aggressive, blaze-of-glory playstyle, and my leaning into it with the villainy schtick, all the more absurd.
A good friend of mine, someone who lives on irony and dark humour, once introduced me to someone with: "You'll hate him. He, like, has kids and a wife and they are nice and happy and they actually go to church and volunteer and it's fucking disgusting."
Does that count? It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.
This morning I was in a supermarket packed with harried pre-Christmas shoppers. The produce section in particular was an absolute logjam of carts and impatient people trying to figure out their next move in a sea of people trying to do the same. One excessively polite/cautious woman who had been waiting far too long, and hopelessly, for the stream of carts blocking her access to the pre-washed spinach to stop, finally made her move, stepping quickly in front of a slowly moving cart for the second or so that it took to grab the spinach with an excessively penitent "I'm so sorry!" posture.
After she apologetically scooted back with her package a very nice fellow, maybe in his early seventies, turned his head down closer to her and intoned with mock seriousness, "You're a menace to society!"
She apppeared slightly alarmed/chastened for about a half second, but then smiled, and probably had a better day.
I’m taking rhetorical irony very broadly instead of the hipster version I find too narrow. In a very general sense irony is just saying one thing and meaning another. So a kind version of irony could just be someone being gently sarcastic to a friend to tell them something.
Or in writing you could point to something like the more easygoing Shakespeare comedies like As You Like It. Or maybe something like The Importance of Being Earnest.
Maybe it’s easiest to think in terms of the saying one thing meaning another formula. Bland Internet hipster irony always means something like — “you’re a loser for liking this “ or “I hate myself but I like this” or “the Internet makes everything seem dumb and pointless lol”. But you can point to infinite other ways of seeing the world with ironic speech …
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the internet was young and populated mostly by thoughtful folks, Carl Beijer’s tweet would have been regarded as a fine troll (when "trolling" meant something besides behaving badly online). Perhaps it is still a fine troll. But today so many people post brainless shit like that in perfect sincerity it's very hard to get the joke unless you know more, as you suggested, about Carl Beijer himself.
But . . . Twitter. I don't really know WTF is going on there.
Perhaps it's my own particular insecurities that induce me to interpret the ubiquitousness of irony this way, but it seems like it's a reaction to a world that seems increasingly and reflexively critical of everything. One of irony's most potent side effects is that it masks vulnerability because irony creates distance for the speaker (or at least, the illusion of distance). That "side effect" has become the reason for its ubiquity. It's a way to protect oneself from criticism and judgement. Saying something in a straightforward manner -- even expressing straightforward criticism -- leaves one open to all kinds of judgement.
I agree. One use of irony is its ambiguity. If I say something, and it turns out to be indefensible, well, I was just being ironic. Push that a little further, and I start out being ironic, but then I can slide that over into a genuine comment.
Yes, I think that is at play in some cases; in others, it's the desire to avoid appearing to care earnestly because caring is lame. In still others, it seems to be about a sort of lack of faith one's ability to change anything about anything, and this sort of irony shields one from the responsibility to take any action, like a mode of expression that is prebaked to be one of observation, like a meta-conversation.
I think this is really insightful—irony as a means of testing the water before fully wading in (or maybe in place of doing so). Which feels much more necessary when so much of our online communication is done before a huge audience of people, often with diverse perspectives and opinions, and who have the empathy-evoking quality of face-to-face human conversation removed, which means some responses can be quite vicious.
You see it a lot in blockbuster media a lot nowadays. I generally like the MCU, but oof are they allergic to letting a heavy moment be a moment without immediately making a joke out of it. They've made all the money and yet it's like they're still embarrassed of what they are.
Yes!!! I came here to comment something like that. But I think that's why the MCU movies are so popular and the DC ones are not.
You can see this most clearly with Spider-Man, I think. He was always a loser schlub founded in tragedy, but in the MCU, all of that is basically stripped away and the movies aren't nearly as fun. Like come on, Spider-Man in ITALY??? He should be beating up carjackers in Queens and then coming home and getting yelled at for not doing his homework.
I am somewhat worried that the bathos is why the movies were so successful but continue to hope they were successful despite it. The Dark Knight and Joker both succeeded despite being intensely sincere. The other DC movies struggled with basic problems that would have torpedoed them whether or not they were sincere or ironic.
Like anything, bathos can be used to great effect, but I'm not sure how you look at a scene like the one in Endgame where Thor is making a impassioned, literally-in-tears plea to be the one to undo the snap and bring everyone back because he feels like he needs to do this to atone for his failures--even if it kills him--and think "man, what this scene *really* needs is a joke about how he's fat and his veins flow with cheez-whiz". Completely ruins the flow of the whole scene.
This is an insightful point, and I think it ties into the culture of ironic self deprecation that is everywhere now. people will jokingly say some truly mean and sad things about themselves, but you’re the idiot if you act like it was a troubling thing to say – of course it’s just joking, it’s just a meme, I’m trash lol lol lol.
It also makes me think of Lauren Oyler’s (and Freddie’s review of) “Fake Accounts,” a book which seemed to me to be baseline defined by what you describe. The author ensures she doesn’t have to stand by anything she says by couching it all in detached irony. if you didn’t like it, or think it didn’t work, joke’s on you for taking it too seriously — Oyler certainly didn’t, she implies. What, it’s just a book. Who cares if it’s good. Most things are bad, right? Calm down.
Yes, it does. I think the fear of being uncool drives many to this. It is ok not to be cool, but a lot of people fear that characterization. Librarians and accountants and carpenters--three occupations I know well--tend to accept the world in which they work and are confident that they are doing work that doesn't need ironic framing to produce acceptable outcomes.
First, what do you expect from platforms like Twitter or tiktok? Neither were developed with the intent of sharing deep emotional expression. Second, if you are looking for authentic and deep content, it exists. It’s called OnlyFans (j/k). Actually, on YouTube there are some really good channels that promote authentic human connection. One channel I love is Noah Roth (https://youtube.com/c/noahroth), a YouTuber from Kentucky who documents coming of age, finding a boyfriend, traveling, and really trying to figure out the point of life. There is something deeply authentic about his content, which is missing from the tea-spilling, get rich quick, become your best self now content that is all over social media.
You understand that, as a socialist, I have to interact in real life, on a weekly basis, with people who leaned their politics online, right?
Like, I get where this is coming from - internet obsessives love to project internet obsession onto others. But I have to live with the consequences of this shit wherever I go, politically. Why would I pretend that it has no consequences?
Since I spend a lot of time with teenagers in my job I don’t quite identify with the angst of this post. Most of the teenagers I’ve met in the past decade need a little more irony IMO. The current teenage culture is all about constantly expressing your sincere emotional desires all the time as a route to better mental health. Listen to the most popular teenage music and it’s all so much more emo than it was in the 2010s. I like a lot of it: the new Billie Eilish record is better than her first one, Lil Peep and JuiceWRLD are good, xxxtentacion is horrible. But it’s all really sincere.
Maybe it’s hard to get out of my own filter since I was such a teenage ironist, but the indie rock kids these days are listening to pop punk, and the rap kids are listening to rap that’s so much more emo than it’s ever been.
It’s not just me, trust a full time music critic: “More than any other point in the last twenty years, the many levels of visible artists that make up pop music in 2021 are awash in the language of trauma, pain, and healing.“
Maybe it's the "flatness and intensities" thing Fredric Jameson was talking about. (A lot of his stuff went over his head, I ain't that bright.) Nobody can live in the land of Flat Sarcastic Irony forever, so it's sometimes pierced by wild outbursts of Literally Shaking Right Now. I can see how popular music would prefer the latter over the former, given only those two options.
I don't know who any of those musicians are, but I know what you're talking about
I wouldn't call it sincere, though. It's magnifying weakness. The path to respect in our culture involves proving that you're the meekest, the most hurt, the most oppressed.
Though I don't think anyone actually respects that. We just pretend to
None of that music is really my thing personally but I don't think its magnifying weakness. It's just big cathartic music about emotional turmoil, which teenagers have liked since the advent of recorded music.
I can't disagree with whatever you've observed, but as a high school English teacher, most of my anecdotal evidence points in the opposite direction: the TikToks my students share (and play repeatedly, at shattering volumes, three times every class period) are dripping with the mean-spirited sarcasm that online cringe culture lends itself to. Talk to them one-on-one or look at their personal essays and they can get painfully, awkwardly sincere, sure. But around each other, in public, it's still not cool to care, same as it was ten or twenty or fifty years ago.
JuiceWRLD is amazing, RIP, his work may be something of an outlier though, he expressed so much grief and wrote very directly about addiction and mental illness but I think there were plenty of double/multiple meanings in the lyrics, eg “Bad Boy” (one of my kids is a fan)
Billie Eilish - “I’m the bad guy, Duh” - her whole persona seems irony-based to me.
Maybe the juxtaposition of lostness and agony with social expectations is being used as an automatic irony generator. So it still feels earnest.
It's a rough problem, but it reminds me of something I've noticed in my own life, which is that my own attitude affects how people respond to me. In person. Online...not so much.
But genuinely enjoying my job and life (helped along by some comparisons to folks who are far worse off) generally means that most of my interactions end up being positive, whether ironic/joking or sincere.
But that tone and general happiness doesn't translate online (sometimes admittedly because I'm not so happy online...which probably says something about how I should spend my time).
Nice article. So many in our millennial generation have been irony poisoned and my anecdotal experience has been the same as you: none of the folks I know who live behind a veil of irony and snark seem particularly happy.
I'm starting to notice signs of a thesis/antithesis/synthesis in pop culture though. Specially, I've listened to DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ more than anything else this year. Her work is flush with ironic signifiers - starting with that ridiculous name! But there's a simple, earnest joy at the heart of her music that is undeniable. My wife calls it girls music - but in a positive sense, like the films of Douglas Sirk were initially derided as women's films, then reassessed as deeply emotive works of art years later. Like Sabrina though, Sirk usually had the coy, ironic Rock Hudson gently smirking at the stuffy and restrictive heretonormative mores of the time. He reminds us that as beautiful as life can be, you always need a bit of a sense of humor. Maybe we're collectively rediscovering this delicate balance again.
The title is too good a metaphor. It will come to mind unbidden next time I am in a Twitter rabbit hole, and despite agreeing with you, I kind of hate you for that.
Sometimes I feel very grateful that my autism partially blinds me to sarcasm and irony. It makes people look stupider, but it also makes them look like actual human beings with actual human emotions which I think is an improvement.
As a non-autistic person: It is a gift to be treasured when you say something you think is very clever and an autistic person bluntly asks you, “What do you mean by that?” I mean this completely sincerely. Makes you have to look at yourself and the words coming out of your mouth without artifice for like three seconds, which makes you realize how infrequently you take that kind of look.
I have not thought about Aimee Terese for one second, when writing this, and blank sarcasm is a universal problem. And for your entirely unearned tone, I'm banning you. Do not come to my house and presume to lecture me, particularly in a way that demonstrates what a very online loser to truly are.
Well, this made me sad.
https://youtu.be/8nBFqZppIF0
No doubt.
That's a fucking music video.
I'm old.
" I don’t know what the absolute fuck anyone is saying anymore because they are so terrified of just saying “I feel this, and it matters to me.”"
Man, a-fuckin-men. Irony isn't bad, as such, and used in appropriate proportions its fine. It's funny and can be used insightfully. But everything and everyonw these days is dripping in so many layers of irony it frequently takes me quite a while just to unwrap what the fuck they are even trying to say. That's if they were even trying to say anything at all.
how can i be as happy as the guy who put the phrase "shitting into each other's mouths" right into my eyeballs over my morning coffee?
Ironic detachment is the key ingredient in social media, an opiate synthesized to poison us. Freddie hits the nail on the head here.
I appreciate you highlighting how dumb the hipster irony vs “New Sincerity” binary is. Such simplistic thinking.
It’s also a serious debasing of the infinite range of irony. Why is the only option a sneering I-hate-everything blank faced internet irony? Why not a generous irony? Or a gentle one? Or a grim and sophisticated one? So much is more possible!
Irony can absolutely be kind. But then, kindness isn't what the internet was made for.
Well, the Internet was made for war/DARPA and then got appropriated.
Especially twitter.
True. Yet somehow back in the days of Word.com, we expected it would be. Like Rick in Casablanca, we were misinformed.
I'm curious what an example of generous or kind irony would be? I'm having trouble figuring out what that would look like.
90% of the tweets I see the tweeter thinks they are ironic or arch but they are self-referential and not unique.
In my friend group, people often joke that I'm an scheming comic book supervillain. I have a very dark sense of humor, and in most games I play, I tend towards high-risk, high-reward playstyles that either succeed spectacularly, or fail spectacularly. They know I'm actually a decent, humble person, which makes the contrast to my aggressive, blaze-of-glory playstyle, and my leaning into it with the villainy schtick, all the more absurd.
I feel like Lake Wobegon stories were a good example of kind, loving irony.
A good friend of mine, someone who lives on irony and dark humour, once introduced me to someone with: "You'll hate him. He, like, has kids and a wife and they are nice and happy and they actually go to church and volunteer and it's fucking disgusting."
Does that count? It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.
This morning I was in a supermarket packed with harried pre-Christmas shoppers. The produce section in particular was an absolute logjam of carts and impatient people trying to figure out their next move in a sea of people trying to do the same. One excessively polite/cautious woman who had been waiting far too long, and hopelessly, for the stream of carts blocking her access to the pre-washed spinach to stop, finally made her move, stepping quickly in front of a slowly moving cart for the second or so that it took to grab the spinach with an excessively penitent "I'm so sorry!" posture.
After she apologetically scooted back with her package a very nice fellow, maybe in his early seventies, turned his head down closer to her and intoned with mock seriousness, "You're a menace to society!"
She apppeared slightly alarmed/chastened for about a half second, but then smiled, and probably had a better day.
I’m taking rhetorical irony very broadly instead of the hipster version I find too narrow. In a very general sense irony is just saying one thing and meaning another. So a kind version of irony could just be someone being gently sarcastic to a friend to tell them something.
Or in writing you could point to something like the more easygoing Shakespeare comedies like As You Like It. Or maybe something like The Importance of Being Earnest.
Maybe it’s easiest to think in terms of the saying one thing meaning another formula. Bland Internet hipster irony always means something like — “you’re a loser for liking this “ or “I hate myself but I like this” or “the Internet makes everything seem dumb and pointless lol”. But you can point to infinite other ways of seeing the world with ironic speech …
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the internet was young and populated mostly by thoughtful folks, Carl Beijer’s tweet would have been regarded as a fine troll (when "trolling" meant something besides behaving badly online). Perhaps it is still a fine troll. But today so many people post brainless shit like that in perfect sincerity it's very hard to get the joke unless you know more, as you suggested, about Carl Beijer himself.
But . . . Twitter. I don't really know WTF is going on there.
What's the line about the state of discourse when satire is indistinguishable from the thing it satirizes?
That Hanania tweet is very Jacob Wohl in a hipster coffee shop vibe
Perhaps it's my own particular insecurities that induce me to interpret the ubiquitousness of irony this way, but it seems like it's a reaction to a world that seems increasingly and reflexively critical of everything. One of irony's most potent side effects is that it masks vulnerability because irony creates distance for the speaker (or at least, the illusion of distance). That "side effect" has become the reason for its ubiquity. It's a way to protect oneself from criticism and judgement. Saying something in a straightforward manner -- even expressing straightforward criticism -- leaves one open to all kinds of judgement.
I agree. One use of irony is its ambiguity. If I say something, and it turns out to be indefensible, well, I was just being ironic. Push that a little further, and I start out being ironic, but then I can slide that over into a genuine comment.
Yes, I think that is at play in some cases; in others, it's the desire to avoid appearing to care earnestly because caring is lame. In still others, it seems to be about a sort of lack of faith one's ability to change anything about anything, and this sort of irony shields one from the responsibility to take any action, like a mode of expression that is prebaked to be one of observation, like a meta-conversation.
I think this is really insightful—irony as a means of testing the water before fully wading in (or maybe in place of doing so). Which feels much more necessary when so much of our online communication is done before a huge audience of people, often with diverse perspectives and opinions, and who have the empathy-evoking quality of face-to-face human conversation removed, which means some responses can be quite vicious.
You see it a lot in blockbuster media a lot nowadays. I generally like the MCU, but oof are they allergic to letting a heavy moment be a moment without immediately making a joke out of it. They've made all the money and yet it's like they're still embarrassed of what they are.
Yes!!! I came here to comment something like that. But I think that's why the MCU movies are so popular and the DC ones are not.
You can see this most clearly with Spider-Man, I think. He was always a loser schlub founded in tragedy, but in the MCU, all of that is basically stripped away and the movies aren't nearly as fun. Like come on, Spider-Man in ITALY??? He should be beating up carjackers in Queens and then coming home and getting yelled at for not doing his homework.
I am somewhat worried that the bathos is why the movies were so successful but continue to hope they were successful despite it. The Dark Knight and Joker both succeeded despite being intensely sincere. The other DC movies struggled with basic problems that would have torpedoed them whether or not they were sincere or ironic.
Like anything, bathos can be used to great effect, but I'm not sure how you look at a scene like the one in Endgame where Thor is making a impassioned, literally-in-tears plea to be the one to undo the snap and bring everyone back because he feels like he needs to do this to atone for his failures--even if it kills him--and think "man, what this scene *really* needs is a joke about how he's fat and his veins flow with cheez-whiz". Completely ruins the flow of the whole scene.
The Dark Knight also came out almost 15 years ago. In today's culture it might as well have come out 50 years ago.
I heard the latest Spiderman is perfection, from a source who daily shits on MCU movies.
This is an insightful point, and I think it ties into the culture of ironic self deprecation that is everywhere now. people will jokingly say some truly mean and sad things about themselves, but you’re the idiot if you act like it was a troubling thing to say – of course it’s just joking, it’s just a meme, I’m trash lol lol lol.
It also makes me think of Lauren Oyler’s (and Freddie’s review of) “Fake Accounts,” a book which seemed to me to be baseline defined by what you describe. The author ensures she doesn’t have to stand by anything she says by couching it all in detached irony. if you didn’t like it, or think it didn’t work, joke’s on you for taking it too seriously — Oyler certainly didn’t, she implies. What, it’s just a book. Who cares if it’s good. Most things are bad, right? Calm down.
Thanks, that's a really good dimension -- the "mode" of irony enables that deflection of "oh you shouldn't take this seriously."
Yes, it does. I think the fear of being uncool drives many to this. It is ok not to be cool, but a lot of people fear that characterization. Librarians and accountants and carpenters--three occupations I know well--tend to accept the world in which they work and are confident that they are doing work that doesn't need ironic framing to produce acceptable outcomes.
First, what do you expect from platforms like Twitter or tiktok? Neither were developed with the intent of sharing deep emotional expression. Second, if you are looking for authentic and deep content, it exists. It’s called OnlyFans (j/k). Actually, on YouTube there are some really good channels that promote authentic human connection. One channel I love is Noah Roth (https://youtube.com/c/noahroth), a YouTuber from Kentucky who documents coming of age, finding a boyfriend, traveling, and really trying to figure out the point of life. There is something deeply authentic about his content, which is missing from the tea-spilling, get rich quick, become your best self now content that is all over social media.
You understand that, as a socialist, I have to interact in real life, on a weekly basis, with people who leaned their politics online, right?
Like, I get where this is coming from - internet obsessives love to project internet obsession onto others. But I have to live with the consequences of this shit wherever I go, politically. Why would I pretend that it has no consequences?
That makes sense. I try to ignore those people, which is likely my own defense mechanisms at work. Sorry that you don’t get that privilege.
I'm very confused. I will take that as a good thing: maybe I haven't been on Twitter enough to understand
Again, nothing in this post is exclusively to Twitter, at all.
I'm ready for a big purge of this comment section. You have all gotten way too comfortable here.
Uh oh.
Since I spend a lot of time with teenagers in my job I don’t quite identify with the angst of this post. Most of the teenagers I’ve met in the past decade need a little more irony IMO. The current teenage culture is all about constantly expressing your sincere emotional desires all the time as a route to better mental health. Listen to the most popular teenage music and it’s all so much more emo than it was in the 2010s. I like a lot of it: the new Billie Eilish record is better than her first one, Lil Peep and JuiceWRLD are good, xxxtentacion is horrible. But it’s all really sincere.
Is it?
Maybe it’s hard to get out of my own filter since I was such a teenage ironist, but the indie rock kids these days are listening to pop punk, and the rap kids are listening to rap that’s so much more emo than it’s ever been.
https://last-donut-of-the-night.letterdrop.com/c/31-thoughts-on-2017-frank-ocean-lil-peep-lorde-and-pops-new-emotionalism
It’s not just me, trust a full time music critic: “More than any other point in the last twenty years, the many levels of visible artists that make up pop music in 2021 are awash in the language of trauma, pain, and healing.“
I'd prefer irony to that
Maybe it's the "flatness and intensities" thing Fredric Jameson was talking about. (A lot of his stuff went over his head, I ain't that bright.) Nobody can live in the land of Flat Sarcastic Irony forever, so it's sometimes pierced by wild outbursts of Literally Shaking Right Now. I can see how popular music would prefer the latter over the former, given only those two options.
I don't know who any of those musicians are, but I know what you're talking about
I wouldn't call it sincere, though. It's magnifying weakness. The path to respect in our culture involves proving that you're the meekest, the most hurt, the most oppressed.
Though I don't think anyone actually respects that. We just pretend to
None of that music is really my thing personally but I don't think its magnifying weakness. It's just big cathartic music about emotional turmoil, which teenagers have liked since the advent of recorded music.
I can't disagree with whatever you've observed, but as a high school English teacher, most of my anecdotal evidence points in the opposite direction: the TikToks my students share (and play repeatedly, at shattering volumes, three times every class period) are dripping with the mean-spirited sarcasm that online cringe culture lends itself to. Talk to them one-on-one or look at their personal essays and they can get painfully, awkwardly sincere, sure. But around each other, in public, it's still not cool to care, same as it was ten or twenty or fifty years ago.
JuiceWRLD is amazing, RIP, his work may be something of an outlier though, he expressed so much grief and wrote very directly about addiction and mental illness but I think there were plenty of double/multiple meanings in the lyrics, eg “Bad Boy” (one of my kids is a fan)
Billie Eilish - “I’m the bad guy, Duh” - her whole persona seems irony-based to me.
Maybe the juxtaposition of lostness and agony with social expectations is being used as an automatic irony generator. So it still feels earnest.
It's a rough problem, but it reminds me of something I've noticed in my own life, which is that my own attitude affects how people respond to me. In person. Online...not so much.
But genuinely enjoying my job and life (helped along by some comparisons to folks who are far worse off) generally means that most of my interactions end up being positive, whether ironic/joking or sincere.
But that tone and general happiness doesn't translate online (sometimes admittedly because I'm not so happy online...which probably says something about how I should spend my time).
Nice article. So many in our millennial generation have been irony poisoned and my anecdotal experience has been the same as you: none of the folks I know who live behind a veil of irony and snark seem particularly happy.
I'm starting to notice signs of a thesis/antithesis/synthesis in pop culture though. Specially, I've listened to DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ more than anything else this year. Her work is flush with ironic signifiers - starting with that ridiculous name! But there's a simple, earnest joy at the heart of her music that is undeniable. My wife calls it girls music - but in a positive sense, like the films of Douglas Sirk were initially derided as women's films, then reassessed as deeply emotive works of art years later. Like Sabrina though, Sirk usually had the coy, ironic Rock Hudson gently smirking at the stuffy and restrictive heretonormative mores of the time. He reminds us that as beautiful as life can be, you always need a bit of a sense of humor. Maybe we're collectively rediscovering this delicate balance again.
this comment section was the last place i expected to find someone talking about DJSTTDJ lol. but yea the douglas sirk comparison is right on.
The title is too good a metaphor. It will come to mind unbidden next time I am in a Twitter rabbit hole, and despite agreeing with you, I kind of hate you for that.
Sometimes I feel very grateful that my autism partially blinds me to sarcasm and irony. It makes people look stupider, but it also makes them look like actual human beings with actual human emotions which I think is an improvement.
As a non-autistic person: It is a gift to be treasured when you say something you think is very clever and an autistic person bluntly asks you, “What do you mean by that?” I mean this completely sincerely. Makes you have to look at yourself and the words coming out of your mouth without artifice for like three seconds, which makes you realize how infrequently you take that kind of look.