Procrastinating Post-Irony

This week I completed 85% of the essays in Chuck Klosterman’s new book, Eating the Dinosaur. As this is the third of Klosterman’s books I’ve read (or in the process of reading), I believe this makes me 96% prepared¹ to share my thoughts on his writing.

My usual comprehension process when reading his prose entails reading, re-reading what concepts I failed to understand the first time, pondering these concepts for a few moments, and then completely forgetting whatever the fuck I just learned approximately 1.5 years later. This time, however, I’m hoping to have a little more longevity – this is the first time I’m actually translating my ideas into writing – though I still can’t say I won’t forget this all in a year and a half.

The one piece that I’m having the most trouble trying to extricate from my memory is titled “T is for True,” in which Klosterman discusses three individuals (Ralph Nader, German filmmaker Werner Herzog, and Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo) who are all too literal for our universally ironic society. His basic premise is that as media consumers our minds are almost always trying to pin down what’s ironic that we struggle to discern anything intended to be taken at face value. This I generally accept; we all understand that guy who never ceases to be disingenuous or sarcastic, we all understand basically everything that’s funny about the show The Office, and we all question the “reality” contained within certain reality television. Yet I’m still struggling to wrap my head around this later hypothesis: “I often wonder if we would all be better off if we looked at all idioms of art in a completely literal fashion, all the time. It would be confusing as hell for the first twenty or so years, but I suspect the world would eventually make more sense than it does now. At least we could agree on whatever it is we’re pretending to understand.”

For the moment, I’m going to loosely-term what Klosterman just described as “post-irony.” Although he never uses this term and would likely lament my doing so, I believe it’s a fitting label based upon sheer logic and the cursory Google investigation I just conducted. This proved “post-ironic” to be an incipient term describing anything from self-recognized sincerity following a period of sarcasm to “a way for pretentious assholes to be even bigger pretentious assholes” that ultimately ends in nothing (see: Youtube, The Qwesi). For the purposes of this argument, I’m going to create an ambiguous² spin on the former definition and state that any artistic endeavor considered post-ironic should satisfy these conditions: (1) the work must be a genuine attempt in whatever genre it’s categorized in without being self-deprecating or sarcastic in any way; (2) there can be no ulterior, superfluous, or otherwise sexual association therein; and (3) said work must demonstrate a recognition of ironic possibility but continue to deny it in favor of something more real.

The third condition is what separates that which is simply very literal from that which is post-ironic, and also why I didn’t rush to classify Klosterman’s quote under that category. To use one of his examples, when Ralph Nader said that Obama needed to decide whether he’s going to be “Uncle Sam for the people of this country, or Uncle Tom for the giant corporations,” he was using the term “Uncle Tom” in the strict definition outlined by Harriet Beecher Stowe, not in the cultural context it later received. Even though Nader was probably aware of the racial connotation to the term, he did not use it because of this connotation or try to reverse the normative perspective on it. He is therefore not post-ironic because irony seems to rarely, if ever, penetrate his mind.

However, irony does penetrate the minds of lots and lots of people, and especially the minds of really important people like television producers. Every time they conceive a new idea for a show, they must make certain audio and visual decisions based upon how they think it should be laid out. While many of these decisions are uninteresting to anyone outside the established media and more importantly irrelevant to this discussion, there is one that I believe at least scratches the surface of post-irony as a quantifiable idea. And that would be the marooned stepchild of American television, the laugh track.

As many of you have noticed, canned laughter has become all but extinct in recent years, with a growing trend in preference of sitcoms like Curb Your Enthusiasm and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that don’t include it. It has become so obsolete in fact that those in the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences hardly continue to associate it with serious artistic merit: in 2000 Sex and the City was the only show nominated for the Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy not to use a laugh track, while How I Met Your Mother was the only show nominated in the same category in 2009 to use one.

It may not be a surprise to anyone whose read his work that Chuck Klosterman is not a fan of the laugh track, though it’s possible he may be more than he realizes. In an earlier essay from Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman says that he “can’t think of anything philosophically stupider than laugh tracks.” Twelve pages later he concludes, “canned laughter is a lucid manifestation of an anxious culture that doesn’t know what is (and isn’t) funny.” Let me start by saying that on most levels, I agree with this assertion. But I also don’t think it’s anything new to say that the American audience is generally ignorant and relies on the media to direct whatever it’s supposed to feel. Direction is everywhere, from the canned laughter in sitcoms to the melodramatic orchestras in tear-jerking dramas. Yet what makes the laugh track a particularly interesting narrative device, especially in today’s culture, is that it remains a viable way for television studios to get people to laugh. Despite the frequency of ironic parodies³ and attempts to render it kitsch, the laugh track continues to survive in the form of a few CBS sitcoms (The Big Bang Theory, Two and A Half Men, HIMYM) and a host of children’s shows.

Why? Well before I get into my spiel about how the laugh track is the paragon of post-irony and how the folks at CBS may or may not⁴ be geniuses, let me say that I have no clue what goes on in production meetings and if the laugh track is or isn’t a selling point. What I do know is that, ostensibly, the idea of integrating a laugh track into a sitcom is post-ironic. This is defined by the three conditions I set forth earlier:
(1) the sitcom is using the laugh track for its primary intention – to make people laugh;
(2) the laugh track may indicate sexual or even ironic moments within the context of a particular plot, but this is about the laugh track immaterial of content (in other words, the shows themselves are not post-ironic, just the fact that they use a laugh track);
(3) somewhere along the line of production there was, for whatever reason, a conscious decision to include a laugh track, which contrasts with the steady trend in post-2000 sitcoms to do otherwise.

Now, if you’ve made it this far you might think this is just a solipsistic gimmick I set up to make myself feel good about my own deranged theories. While I don’t doubt that some of that may be going on, I’m probably more interested in understanding the reasoning behind using the laugh track as a post-ironic device. Do the producers at CBS really think we are that stupid and need our social cues spoon-fed? Or are they consciously attempting to fill a collective cultural void that yearns for honesty and is blighted by irony?

I think it’s probably some combination of the two but either way, heralding a completely literal, post-ironic world becomes dangerous when you start to consider what might become the norm. Unfortunately for Klosterman and the rest of its detractors, the laugh track almost has to exist in a post-ironic society. Yet I’m not advocating or accepting irony as the normative cultural standard either; I agree that it can lead to confusion, deception, and possibly even worse. All I’m saying is that wholesale sincerity or post-irony isn’t the solution – a show like How I Met Your Mother wouldn’t even exist were irony not such a prevalent comedic device – and we should recognize that irony can inhabit a reasonable place within society.

For one reason or another, irony became ingrained into our cultural code and maybe even our brains. It may be time to scale it back, but I can say with certainty that it’s also not going anywhere.

¹Calculated based on the number of chapters I’ve read divided by the number of chapters he’s written in these 3 books.
²Ambiguous because post-irony and irony can exist at the same time, as some aspects of the work fall into each category. This will hopefully become clearer as this progresses.
³At least three episodes of Family Guy have used canned laughter and/or applause to play up the absurdity of the tactic. Anyone who has seen even one episode understands why.
⁴Even if this were what they were going for, would this strategy even work? Maybe it's best to save that for another entry.