It's Funny Because It's True

And it's true because it's funny.

Content warning: This post discusseds the recent mass shootings in Uvalde, TX and Highland Park, IL as well as other traumatic events.

Also note: This post is too long to appear in its entirety in many email programs. If you want to make sure to read the whole thing, please click through to see it on the newsletter website.

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Things seem really bad right now.

The sound of children screaming has been removed.

This disclaimer, in the corner of the surveillance video footage from inside Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, TX, is the most haunting sentence I have read in recent memory.

Had it been rendered in a work of literature I would have admired how the author used straightforward, clinical language to highlight the underlying horror, but this is the world we live in, not a work of fiction.

“The sound of children screaming has been removed” strikes me as a grimly perfect encapsulation of the age we’re living through. If the horrors experienced by the schoolchildren at Robb Elementary are not enough, consider the two-year-old boy whose parents were murdered at the July 4th parade in Highland Park, IL.

If this is still not enough, how about the story of the 10-year-old girl who had to travel from Ohio to Indiana to receive appropriate medical care - an abortion - following her rape? This story was publicly doubted in many conservative corners, including the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which called the story “too good to confirm,” “good” meaning that they felt it was invented for the sake of political expediency by pro-choice supporters, because who on earth could believe that it’s sensible to have laws requiring pregnant 10-year-olds to carry children to term?

Apparently, the answer to that question is the general council for National Right to Life, Jim Bopp, the man responsible for drafting model legislation meant to ban abortion outright, and holding anyone who participates in one (including the pregnant person) criminally liable. When asked what he thought would happen had the 10-year-old gone forward with the pregnancy, Bopp told Politico (emphasis mine), “She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,”

The sound of a Substack newsletter writer screaming has been removed.

The impulse to “joke.”

I do not know why I could not resist that joke right above. I ask for your forgiveness, but I will be honest, I feel a little better having done it. The impulse to joke in the face of horror is long and distinguished and very human.

For a time, because I was teaching courses in humor writing and humor in American literature I decided I’d pretend I was a humor scholar, so I did a bunch of reading on humor and laughter, including Freud - like everything else with him, he thought laughter was the release of tension - and a guy named Henri Bergson, a French philosopher who wrote a series of essays on laughter and humor, available in the collection, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.

Bergson had three main threads of argument:

1. What he calls “the comic” (essentially the existence of anything engendered to make us laugh) is a human phenomenon: Only humans can laugh and can be viewed as the source that generates laughter. So, for example, when our dogs do something that makes us laugh, the laughter is not intended by the animal, but a consequence of the human interpretation of the action.

2. Laughter requires a kind of indifference and detachment. The closer one is to the phenomenon, and experiences the seriousness of it, the more difficult it is to laugh. I think this is both true (and as I’ll try to show), not true. For sure, my small joke up the page is only possible because as upsetting as I may find these events as a person living in this country at this time, I am not personally and directly affected by them. But I also think there’s an argument for humor as a mechanism for closer engagement with a subject as I’m about to explore.

3. Laughter is properly seen as a collective enterprise. In short, it’s harder to laugh alone. Additionally, the act of collective laughter creates a shared social reality. When we laugh together at something, a meaningful understanding across individuals has been demonstrated.

To Bergson’s third point, a humor response is often triggered by a moment of recognition, that the “joke” has captured something that the receiver of the joke recognizes as accurate, reflective of how they see the world, but until that instant, they weren’t fully aware of it. In class, I would sometimes summarize this as “It’s funny because it’s true. It’s true, because it’s funny.”

Irony is dead?

Writing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter declared, “It’s the end of the age of irony. Things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear.”

Carter was referring to an irony of cool detachment embodied at the time by a performer like David Letterman, whose presentation made it look like he was slightly annoyed by his own show, jokes tossed off in a way that suggested little care, segments like “stupid human tricks” taking center stage.¹

Pretty quickly, though, Carter was proven wrong.

In the weeks after 9/11, Letterman, Stewart, other late night comedians shelved the jokes and went sincere, but a mere two weeks after the attacks, The Onion was on the scene, deploying its signature irony.

I recall well the collective sigh of relief at the appearance of that issue of The Onion, dedicated entirely to the tragedy that had happened so recently. There is a fascinating oral history of the process that led to the issue, and the decisions made around which jokes were deemed appropriate, which can be summed up by a comment from Robert Siegel, who was editor-in-chief at the time, “Everything in that issue either needed to make a point or express something people were feeling.”

Here is Bergson’s collective in action, as the famous front page of the issue captures so much of what was swirling around the culture at the time.

This is not an irony of detachment, but of engagement, a mechanism to reconcile the dislocation Americans were living through in the moment after such a sudden trauma. Irony is a tool that highlights incongruity and punctures hypocrisies. In an incongruous and hypocritical world it is a device that expresses something true.

Writing prior to 9/11 in 1999, Jedediah Purdy said, “If we give in to irony, we trust nothing, and nothing is true.”

“If we give in” is an interesting way to phrase this, suggesting that irony is something that has a kind of power over us, rendering us passive, as opposed to something that can be engaged and wrestled with.

The Onion issue above is an example of irony employed in a way that asserts a positive set of values as the inverse of the ironic joke. The joke can only exist if there is something shared and meaningful, something that we actually do believe in, lurking underneath the laughter.

In truth, life in the United States of America has been to live inside irony from its very founding. A nation that declares “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” but really means something closer to:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men - with the exception of women, slaves, indentured servants, or any other groups other than the white, male, land-owning patriarchy/aristocracy - are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, again, unless you’re a slave, female, etc…you get our drift, right?

…is in an inherently ironic state, one that has yet to be actually reconciled.

It is important to remember the context around Purdy’s concerns about irony, having come in the aftermath of the Clinton administration when it looked as though sincere expressions of language had become impossible.

Bill Clinton’s willingness and ability to parse the language using ironic detachment was one of his political superpowers, one for which he was both lampooned, and from which he clearly benefited.

When Clinton said, “I didn’t inhale,” after being asked about smoking pot, the entire world knew he was lying, but we understood the irony underneath, that the president simply could not admit to smoking pot.²

When Clinton, asked in a deposition why he lied to aides about the nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the president fell back on a semantic distinction, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is,’ is,” he said, arguing that as long as he was not actively engaged in a sexual relationship in the present, he was telling the truth.

By this formulation, only if Clinton was asked about the relationship while actively having sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, would he have answered in the affirmative. We all knew it was B.S., but at the same time, we also knew that the entire investigation that had him giving a deposition to a grand jury was B.S., so it became hard to care one way or another.

When people wished for the death of irony after 9/11, this is what they were thinking of, the death of a shared ironic insincerity.

9/11 would not kill insincerity, but it would accelerate something I call “the new sincerity,” something which had already begun by the time the Twin Towers fell.

Irony lives!

In the essay “E Unibus Plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction” (first published in 1993, and collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,) David Foster Wallace argued “That irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and at the same time they are agents of great despair and stasis in U.S. culture.” Having read much of his work, I think David Foster Wallace was torn as a writer, as he wanted nothing more than to be transparently sincere about big, human experiences, but he also felt his generation had been left tools, like irony, ill-suited to the task.

It is ironic, then, that Foster Wallace is one of the authors I would identify at the forefront of what I call “the new sincerity,” writers who attempt to reconcile the comic mode of irony with a desire for increased engagement with the world, rather than a a mechanism to detach from it.³

Foster Wallace wrote “E Unibus Plurum” at the dawn of the Clinton presidency, a period which coincided with the writing and publication of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, a book which is about (among other things) the destruction of humanity at the hands of a video that is so compelling it puts viewers into a catatonic state.

While the book is steeped in ironic humor, it is also a deeply sincere exploration of the attempt to find meaning in life. The working title was A Failed Entertainment, I believe because Foster Wallace recognized that he could not and would not maintain an ironic detachment in his work. A “successful entertainment” under this frame would’ve maintained ironic detachment.

A sincere search for what was meaningful about life was Foster Wallace’s project up until he took his own life, including in his posthumously published novel, The Pale King, which is literally about boredom.

The New Sincerity

Another writer who I think is an important early figure in the new sincerity is my friend, Dave Eggers.

I had the privilege of reading his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in manuscript, a few months before it was published, and I knew in my bones that it was going to make a splash because it said so many things about the world I perceived in ways that I understood. I strongly believed it would speak to a particular set of Generation X folks like me, who understood the ironic mode, but who also were thirsting for meaning and sincerity.

The obviously over-the-top title itself embodies this tension, which is not necessarily a tension at all. The story of the book, a recounting of Eggers at age 22 becoming the primarily caretaker of his younger brother following the deaths of their parents in close succession is heartbreaking. It is also often funny and entertaining.

The opening “rules and regulations” of the book which instruct the reader on how to read and perceive what is to come is textbook ironic detachment, but is employed in a way that allows the audience to understand the sincere place it is coming from, a deeply human fear of disclosing such intimacies to the audience, of potentially getting the story “wrong,” or perhaps worst of all of being misunderstood.

Eggers ends the book discussing the image of a “lattice” in which his friends and other likeminded people are joined together, their fates intertwined and interdependent in ways that require a collective and concentrated commitment to doing right by each other. It is deeply sincere, and emotionally moving, and it is the irony that Eggers leavens the book with that makes it possible to embrace without detaching. Americans of my generation are not wired to handle a straight dose of sincerity, so the ironic nods are necessary, and in the end, make the whole thing feel more true.

I remember getting a little choked up when I read the passage in manuscript. It has the same effect on me today, so I guess I’m not dead yet. That Eggers has spent as much or more of his time as an activist as he has writing suggests he was awfully sincere about his own vision.

In truth, I see the new sincerity not so much as a departure from the past, but as an embrace of a particular strain of postmodern writing that came before, and there is no author who better embodies this than Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel about literal horrors, the allied forces firebombing of Dresden and Vonnegut’s time as a prisoner of war during WWII.

It is a deeply ironic novel that uses the refrain, “So it goes…” to suggest that life itself has no particular order or meaning. But Vonnegut uses this irony in order to make the moments of sincerity all the more powerful. There is a passage in the novel that never fails to move me. It comes after Billy Pilgrim has been captured by the Germans and is being transported by boxcar to a prisoner of war camp.

Even though Billy’s train wasn’t moving, its boxcars were kept locked tight. Nobody was to get off until the final destination. To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through the ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of black bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.

Human beings there were excreting into steel helmets which where passed to the people at the ventilators who dumped them. Billy was a dumper. The human beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill with water. When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.

Vonnegut’s book is about survival in the face of horror, and there is nothing polyannaish about it. The impact of the horror on Billy (and the author) is clear. But there are also these moments of what I would call “wonder” at the capacity for humans to extend grace to each other. (They shared.) To do so under the circumstances in that boxcar becomes a minor miracle.

At times, the ironic attachment is necessary in order to bear what the writer is telling, and what the audience is reading. This is not a failure of engagement, or a lack of sincerity, but its opposite, a recognition of our shared humanity, a humanity that is reaffirmed when we can laugh together.

Humor need not be a disengagement from the horror, but is instead a coping mechanism. At the McSweeney’s website (founded by Dave Eggers, edited by me from 2005-2010, helmed now by the genius editor, Chris Monks), you can find all kinds of humor that trades on irony that serves to reaffirm our shared humanity.

The most read piece of recent vintage, “I’m a Short Afternoon Walk, and You’re Putting Way Too Much Pressure on Me” is instantly relatable to many. Another, “Laws Should be Based Solely on the Words of Constitutional Authors Like Me, the Guy Who Died After Shoving a Piece of Whalebone Up His Dick,” both utilizes irony, and lampoons the ironic mode of our current Supreme Court that cites traditions utterly at odds with the nation we live in as a rationale to drag society backwards. It is an irony of sincerity to counter a transparent irony of insincerity and hypocrisy.

Joking isn’t going to save us.

Don’t get me wrong, as vital as I find humor to be as a way to both explain and experience the world, it’s not like any of this is going to save the republic. Last week, writing at Politico, Juleanna Glover suggested that if Tucker Carlson is to run for president, Democrats should counter with Jon Stewart.

Ugh.

Stewart and Carlson famously clashed when Carlson was co-host of Crossfire on CNN, and Stewart quite sincerely said that he thought the kind of discussion (arguing) that happened on shows like Crossfire was “hurting America,” calling Carlson and his co-host Paul Begala, “partisan hacks,” pointing out, accurately, that Carlson and Begala were engaged in theater, not “debate” as CNN liked to pretend, and implicitly asked the audience to accept.

Stewart punctured the ironic distance that allowed audiences to pretend that what Carlson and Begala was up to could qualify as something designed to better inform the public. The entire segment is resolutely uncomfortable, and very not funny because Stewart refuses to grant Carlson and Begala their fiction.

If there was any justice, this would’ve spurred an awakening, but things have only gotten worse, as people like Carlson don’t even bother with the scrim of ironic distance anymore, and just go full-on white supremacy.

Glover suggests that Stewart would make a good presidential candidate because the takeover of politics by entertainment is now so total, it requires an entertainer to run for president.

That this is taken seriously to the point that Stewart felt compelled to comment on (and mock) the speculation, shows how much further things have fallen since Stewart confronted Carlson on Crossfire so many years ago.

Jon Stewart isn’t going to save us from ourselves. Using irony as a tool to express sincerity isn’t sufficient either. If it was, Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report character would’ve stopped the careers of right wing political hacks in their tracks, but instead we have people who make Colbert’s parody look positively restrained.

Those who were eager to declare irony dead in the aftermath of 9/11 saw it as an indulgence. They’re wrong about that, but neither is it our savior.

That said, I find that sometimes it’s necessary, and helps me cope just a bit better.

Links

My Chicago Tribune column this week is a defense of librarians who are doing their jobs, but are somehow being accused of promoting pedophilia by cynical operators untethered from the notion of a common good coming out of a diverse society.

In other Chicago news, Chicago Magazine has a list of the “10 Best 21st Century Chicago Nonfiction Books.”

The DALL-E, artificial intelligence image creation program is capable of some genuinely interesting “art.” Asking it to produce book covers based on titles, though, is beyond its capabilities. You have to click through to see the visual evidence of the poor (but funny) results.

My friend Teddy Wayne just saw his new novel The Great Man Theory publish this week. At the Times, he gets to do his “By the book” thing, including a recommendation of Alison Espach’s Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, which I’m about halfway through and am so invested in, I think I’ll finish it today.

Sometimes a piece will convince me that I just have to read a writer new to me. That was the case with this article by Angela Ards at Texas Monthly, asking if Texas has “finally found its William Faulkner” in the form of debut novelist, LaToya Watkins, and her novel Perish, which publishes next month.

I’d never thought about this before, but there is indeed a difference between a bookcase, and a bookshelf.

Recommendations

All books linked here are part of The Biblioracle Recommends bookshop at Bookshop.org. Affiliate income for purchases through the bookshop goes to Open Books in Chicago.

Affiliate income is $170.90 for the year.⁴

1. Seasonal Work by Laura Lippman
2. All Her Little Secrets by Wanda Morris
3. Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty
4. The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths
5. Circe by Madeline Miller

Holly S. - Spokane, WA

I can tell that Holly likes a nice, taut work of suspense, so I’m recommending one of my favorites in that category from last year, Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews.

Paid subscriptions and additional content update

Moving threw a bit of a wrench in my plans to start rolling out fresh content by people other than me. Also, after reaching a plateau that made paying outside contributors viable, the gross annualized revenue has been dipping a bit before recently rebounding to $13,434.

The dip is because I am truly lousy at self-promotion, so this is me asking you that if you find value in what appears in this space to consider a paid subscription. Fewer than 10% of subscribers are paid - which is very much within the Substack averages - but if we could get that up to 15%, we could really do some interesting stuff here. My pledge is to keep all content here free for everyone, but this requires those who can to support these endeavors.

That said, I’m excited to start rolling out a new feature I’m calling “A Book I Wish More People Knew About” featuring articles and recommendations from others. I’ve got a couple of contributions in the can, ready to go, and will be releasing the first into the world via your inboxes next week. I hope you’ll give it a read.

I’ll be seeing you right here, next Sunday.

All best,

John
The Biblioracle

1. Of course, in reality, Letterman deeply cared about his show - and pretty much only his show. For an interesting exploration of Letterman’s comedy, and Letterman the person, I recommend Jason Zinoman’s Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night.

2. By the time we got to Barack Obama, his confession to being an actual fan of marijuana - and having tried cocaine - as a young man, was viewed a sign of his authenticity, in contrast to Bill (and by extension Hillary) Clinton.

3. I am not an important writer of my generation, but I consider myself a new sinceritist. At least my intentions run that way.

4. I’ll match affiliate income up to 5% of annualized revenue for the newsletter, or $500, whichever is larger.