Sarcasm is hard (to do over the Internet)

It occurs to me that if you are not good at detecting sarcasm or if I am not good at relaying sarcasm, then holy smokes you must think I’m an interesting person. Just to use examples from the past few posts, if my sarcasm was not relayed successfully, then you must think that I am the type of guy who submits resumes to potential dates, who believes that Art Garfunkel is the key to nirvana, who considered joining a monastery after a close encounter with a thunderbolt, whose idea of a “wild night” involves videos about sentient meat, and who has a disease of music.

I’d read that guy’s blog, too. Sadly, though, I’m not that interesting. The truth is, I drive the most vanilla car that has ever been produced (a 2004 tan Honda Civic), I live in a grandmotherly brick ranch that looks like it came out of a 1950’s assembly line, I work in an office where if I lean back and tilt my neck just right I can kind of see out a window, I wear corduroy pants most days, and I take a lot of naps.

If anything is interesting about me, it is my use of sarcasm. If you take that away from me, then I’ll be just another suburban whitie.

I’ve wondered multiple times if I should stop using it because 80% of the confusion and complaints surrounding things I write have to do with undetected sarcasm.

The problem with sarcasm is twofold: (1) Most of it sucks because it’s snarky, and (2) the rest of it sucks because it often goes undetected.

I’m not opposed to snarkiness when a good dose of mockery it is called for (Oliver Burkeman is really good at this), but mockery is a powerful weapon that should not be left in the hands of amateurs. That’s why I prefer most of my sarcasm to be the subtler, non-mocking variety.

There are ways that I could make my sarcasm more easily detectable. For example, I could turn it into the snarky variety by adding a “yeah, pfft” in front of it (as in “yeah, pfft, that’s original.”). But if I do that, then I am officially a dick. Alternatively, I could point out in parentheses when a sarcastic statement has just been made, but that would ruin the fun because 40% of the joy in sarcasm is wondering, briefly, whether this guy might be serious. The other thing I don’t like about labeling a statement as sarcasm is that it completely negates it, and most of the time there are partial truths within the statement that I don’t want to be negated.

My solution, then, is to do nothing, and to apologize when people think that the forces driving me are boobs and fatties. That works for me because there aren’t a ton of people reading this blog. Where this really becomes a problem is for people like Scott Adams, who is to my mind the Internet’s most skillful purveyor of half-serious statements but is widely read enough that any mildly controversial remark will inevitably result in backlash in some corner of the Internet.

This is a serious problem because if the backlash is sufficiently persistent or large (and some of it has been quite large), then Scott will be forced, or at least seriously encouraged, to tone down his stuff. To be less interesting.

Scott’s current attempt at a workaround seems to be this disclaimer at the top of some of the more controversial posts:

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy or opinion. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.

This disclaimer might help to preempt some shitstorms, or on the other hand it might encourage some by making it seem as if he’s looking for a fight. I wish there were a better solution. I haven’t a clue what it would be.

I’m just hoping to Gaga that Scott finds a serviceable solution, because the Internet needs him. And the Internet needs sarcasm.