Sarcastic Bliss

Just as a small footnote to my last post:
The other day someone, someone who actually knows me very well, said in all seriousness and expecting an answer, “I can’t tell, are you being serious or sarcastic?” To which I said “Both.” It was a calm, straight, flat delivery. Just one word, no looks, or smiles, or cues. I was met with utter silence and befuddlement, that I refused to break.

It was one of those perfect moments when you can just see somebody’s mind spinning. It was like some cheesy logic trap that Spock used to kill an evil android. I started to believe I was going to see smoke and watch eyes roll back into their sockets. Of course I am sure it doesn’t say good things about me that I get so much pleasure out of what was in reality no more that 10 seconds of silence resulting from my insensitive incommunicativeness. But it was sarcastic bliss.

A Cheepy

I wrote this a long time ago and since I don’t seem to have the motivation to blog I am posting this so I feel like I at least care about it, which I don’t. Whatever.

Each year the Washington Post's Style Invitational asks readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter and supply a new definition. This got me thinking. My favorite of the 2001 winners is Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it. My sense of humor often involves ironic sarcasm, which like a double negative, twists meanings and lines of reason into Escheresque Mobius Strips (inside-out pretzel shapes, for the artistically or mathematically less inclined), which more times than not confuse than amuse. This is not all bad since I do get to laugh at people and how badly they misunderstand the joke, but this is totally not the point and the whole pearls-before-swine thing grates on me. This sarcastic, even sardonic, bent in my humoristic style, coupled with a predilection toward purposeful obfuscation and arcane usages results in jokes that seem funny to me on many levels. I enjoy the twists and turns in the joke, the misplaced and mismatched stylistic contexts and disconnects between them and the conceptual realms involved. I particularly like to employ this mismatching technique to refer to base or very crass ideas couched in legalistic or liturgical styles, giving the general or vague impression that the joke is being told from the perspective of, or even as if I were, a pompous ass. It is also fun taking pot shots at absurd fears, paranoias, and imagined character flaws, trying to get people to laugh at their impressions of themselves and realize how funny they are, although deadpan or particularly earnest deliveries are all to often taken at face-value instead of as sarcastic jibes. When a few bad puns are thrown into the mix and every opportunity to use double entendres that avails itself is taken advantage of, my jokes end up as a complicated mish-mash of things that I find funny but no one else enjoys or sometimes are very offended by. I'm not trying to say all my jokes are funny, hell probably 90% of the reason people don't like or get them is because they aren't funny, but the few that I know are hilarious that just go over someone's head really bum me out. Now I have a word to describe this when it happens. Of course it is a homonym and trying to use it will no doubt result in confusion, which I will no doubt be unable not to make fun of and build upon and then I am in the same situation I started out in. Maybe that makes me a Rutard: someone who in spite of themself continues to engage in a behavior they know to be stupid and self-perpetuating.