The Book of Irony: An Introduction

The following is a rough guide to the holy text of the church of irony, sensibly called The Book of Irony, or sometimes Pilgrim's Pirouette. It is called many other things that will not be printed here today. Among the church's faithful it is widely considered to be outmoded, historically inaccurate, self-contradictory, and morally ambiguous -- in short, it is a flawless guide for modern living. It contains, among other things:

• Opening aphorism: "One does not carry sand into the desert, nor coal to Newcastle. The sick man shall go to the hospital and the heavy man to the gymnasium. Why then do you go about blessing the blessed?"
• Retroactive subway system proposals for ancient Sumer and Babylon.
• Apologia for the existence of the preceding, founded upon comparative underworld mythologies.
• A brief primer on the concept of anagnorisis, on which someone has drawn a spoon.
• Pencil sketches of street performers.
• Headlines from the Washington Times and New York Post, painstaking cut & rearranged into headlines from the New York Times and Washington Post.
• An extensive refutation of the previous item, with a convincing argument for the reverse.
• A crossword puzzle, in which every clue has been replaced with the phrase "SUCK IT."
• A set of traditional Zen koans, each with the exclamation "How ironic!" tacked on at the end.
• A chapter of self-referential parables, including "Consider the Mandelbrot Set".
• The final section is a series of blank pages with the heading "Beatitudes". It has been left as an exercise for the reader.
• In this section, on the last page, there is a handwritten Post-It note with the suggestion, "Blessed are the wicked."
• On the inside back cover, an order form for other religious texts from the same publisher. Among them
  • Putting the You Back in J-you-daism!
  • Zen and the Art of Religious Posturing
  • Mormon-y, More Problems
• The back cover itself is, out of a somewhat belated sense of shame, disguised as the Audubon Society Guide to the Birds of North America.

A Case of Mistaken Identity

The really fortunate thing, when one is playing Devil's Advocate, is that one is not tasked with proving Satan's innocence. Such as thing is by definition impossible. One need merely prove he is not Satan.

See also: A Tale of Two Santas

Whitey: Santa Claus, you stand accused of crimes against humanity. How do you plead?
Bender: Not Santa!
[Farnsworth stands up and points at Bender.]
Farnsworth: There he is again!
[He shoots Bender in the back.]

On Hostile Assumptions

Not to callously take advantage of current events, but the current kerfuffle over Letterman's Palin joke precisely proves my point about hostile audiences. Letterman made a joke about Palin's daughter being knocked-up by A-Rod, without specifying which daughter. Palin's response refers to "sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl."

This is only a reasonable response if one begins from the assumption "Dave Letterman is a pedophile," or at the very least "Dave Letterman is an enemy seeking to cause me harm." This sort of cultural paranoia is, I repeat and repeat, poisonous to real communication.

In short, hostility is not an appropriate response to ambiguity.

Letterman's apology is actually quite well-done, since he apologizes for poor execution of the joke rather than any real hostility (presumably there is none). When one is in entertainment, and speaking publicly, one takes on a responsibility to be understood, so this is fair. Of course, with a truly hostile audience, it's impossible to fulfill this responsibility. As such, Letterman's apology makes the charitable assumption that Palin's response was derived from confusion rather than malice.

So yeah, in these terms, Letterman has the moral high ground here.

Some Jokes About Jokes

Okay, so I've got this joke, and I think it's great, but I can't tell it to people. They just stare at me, most of them. It kills with the right crowd, though. Problem is, the right crowd is computational linguists. Still, humble as I am, I may have written the world's best Noam Chomsky joke. So let's talk about jokes.

Now, we're all familiar, I hope, with this old chestnut:

Two guys walk into a bar. One of them ducks.

At root, it's just a pun on the two meanings of bar. But it's also a joke about jokes, because it wouldn't be funny except for a heaping pile of even older chestnuts in which, you know, two guys walk into a bar. In a strange sort of parallelism, there's also a joke about a duck who walks into a bar. That one's not important, though.

My favorite joke is the one that starts like this:

A baby seal walks into a club...

Actually, it ends like that, too. You don't know awkward until you're standing in front of your co-workers at the holiday party, and the head of the company you just joined says, "Well, go on." That's the risk you run when all your jokes play on what the audience expects from a joke. That aside, it's a great joke: I've never seen another that combines brevity, meta-humor, and brutality towards adorable animals in quite the same way.

Now for Noam Chomsky. He's got this sentence about grammar:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Got that? Well, don't worry; it's meant to be a demonstration of how a sentence can be grammatically sound, but not have any semantic meaning. The parts of speech are correct, but green things can't be colorless, ideas don't have color nor do they sleep, and if they did they couldn't sleep furiously. Granted, if you work hard enough with figurative meanings, you can come up with something (there have been competitions), but let's just say it's meaningless.

And here's where I work my "magic":

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. One of them ducks.

I'm telling you, it kills with linguists... Hopefully that was funny, because now I'm going to explain it. As we all know, any joke properly explained ceases to be funny. So this is your last chance. Note that both the "joke" and "non-joke" versions are equally meaningless in an objective sense, but somehow one of them is a joke, and the other isn't. The first version is a bit of nonsense, while the second is two bits of nonsense grafted together, creating a joke, which you might say is just a different kind of nonsense. Of course, the crucial thing is that the audience knows the contexts of both halves of the joke, and the way that those clash creates the humor. You can analyze this joke on as many layers as you want, and I think that's funny too, given that the original statement is from someone looking into the minute details of how language works... I like this joke more than is strictly healthy, I think.

So I'll leave you with one more joke (not mine) that might be about linguistics. It's kind of hard to say:

How do you tell the difference between a duck?
One of its legs are both the same.