That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore
Trump and the end of irony. (This time, for sure.)
I. The miles gloriosus, or “boastful soldier” — an archetype in ancient comedy— takes its name from a play by Plautus, a retelling of a lost Greek original called Alazon, or “The Braggart.”
II. The alazon is the ever-present foil of the eiron, the self-deprecator, and vice versa. Eiron is the root of our word “irony.”
III. The alazon and the eiron form a comedic circuit. The alazon presumes to know more than he does. The eiron claims to know nothing, but — contesting knowledge itself — undermines the alazon and delights the audience.
IV. There is no name for a person who accurately assesses what she does and does not know, for whom there is no place in comedy, let alone in the world.
V. In ancient comedy, alazon and eiron are traditionally a soldier and his slave. In modern comedy, they are Ted Knight and Chevy Chase in Caddyshack.
VI. We are often said to be living in an Age of Irony, but few have suggested that ours is an Alazonic Age, though this seems at least as plausible.
VII. Where has the alazon been? Do we now perhaps face a never-before-theorized Alazonic Age?
Irony as Staged Resistance
Before considering the alazon and eiron as ideas, let’s consider their reality, their persons. The soldier acts and the slave obeys. That is the end of it. The soldier might be boastful and the slave might be resentful, but none of this matters. The possession of a slave confirms the soldier’s power to himself, while the slave’s external impotence is confirmed to himself by his status as slave. The soldier inhabits his boasts and the slave inhabits his deprecation — his diminishment by the soldier — which comes from without, not yet from within.
Alone, they are locked in this immediacy. The soldier/slave can’t really become alazon/eiron without an audience. The slave can perceive the soldier as a buffoon whose self-proclamations do not match his accomplishments, but he will only amuse himself and exact no revenge if he cannot share this knowledge — or knowingness — with others. This knowingness is first shared laterally with other slaves and then diagonally with other soldiers.
The former is to be expected. This is mute rebellion — fight or flight in the realm of the mind. The latter is important, however, since it marks the beginning of the self-consciousness of the soldiers via furtive collusion with each other’s slaves, and the emergence of a narcissism of small differences.
By conceding that fellow soldiers are a bit much in their zealous confidence, the knowing soldiers can — so they think — insulate themselves from the humiliating fate of the alazon. This stage sets up irony as the only hermetically defensible social pose, with all its implications.
What implications?
I. The ridicule of the powerful is aestheticized as comedy. No longer soldier and slave, these persons become tropes: alazon and eiron proper. In comedy, the ridicule of the alazon is authorized and is cathartic for both soldiers and slaves. Slaves are able to mock their tormentors, while soldiers are able to mock a version of themselves while assuring themselves that they are the exception.
II. The aestheticization itself is necessary to drive these furtive alliances out into the open, to make them plain and make sure they do not go too far. And they can go too far, as in the case of Socrates, whose irony was total. He was put to death, Athens fell, and we have no heroes from the subsequent dark age.
The Beginning of the End
It was hard to detect at the time, but our comedy has gotten ever more Alazonic in the last twenty years. Letterman was the apotheosis of the eiron. The lone speaker, ridiculing his presumption to speak. Colbert, meanwhile, is — or was, as “Colbert” — the perfect alazon. He boasted and the audience was invited to laugh at his boasts. But what, then, when irony is removed?
Trump and the End of Irony
I. Have you had a good laugh since Trump was elected? I mean, a really good laugh? I have, a few, but they were not the same. The capacity for confident ridicule — what has been called snark — has been hollowed out. Ridicule itself has become ridiculous. The laughs I’ve had, I can’t even think of them now, have been more like flashes of beauty in a dark time, a certain lightness. They are no longer negative, like irony, but positive, like play.
II. Has Trump ever uttered an ironic statement?
III. Has irony ever harmed him? Has he, the alazon par excellence, even acknowledged that it exists?
IV. What is fascism, really, but kitsch performed without irony?
