Can't you take a joke?
I quoted a paragraph in my last post from Kirsten Powers, whose Substack discusses her departure from Fox/CNN. In “Being on TV was bad for my mental health,” Powers offers a glimpse behind the scenes of that world:
In D.C., people often note when someone “doesn’t get the joke.” By that, they mean a person who takes things too seriously. People who “get the joke” know that arguments on television are theater, and then you go for drinks with the person you were just in a screaming match with. People who “get the joke” don’t take what’s happening in politics too seriously. They treat it like a game.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and Powers’ explanation happened to drive it to the surface of my thoughts. I’ve been wondering for a while exactly how I would characterize the kind of toxic, corrosive irony that has infected our discourse, and I think I’ve boiled it down to a 2-word phrase, one that nearly always makes me cringe when I hear it: just joking.
There are variations on this, of course. On the AITA subreddit, there’s a genre wherein someone asks if they’re the a$$hole for finally blowing up in reaction to “friends,” family, school or work bullies, etc., who have engaged in a campaign of teasing, pestering, trolling, passive aggression, and the like. Invariably, the victims of this abuse, once they’ve finally exploded in response, are told/asked, “Can’t you take a joke?” They’re made to feel, by their abusers (and often their own families), as though they’ve over-reacted.
And of course, they technically have, in the moment. But to the credit of that community, they understand that the moment is often the final straw, that abuse (and the shame, doubt, and grief that it generates) accumulates and lays down roots in your soul that don’t go away just because your abuser(s) turn their attention elsewhere. For many of the posters who share their stories, that explosion of emotion is the first time they’ve ever been able to stand up to their abusers, and that forum is the only place where they might receive support and understanding for doing so.
When I read posts like those, I can’t help it: when I hear someone ask, “Can’t you take a joke?” my visceral, gut reaction is always “Sure I can. Can’t you tell a joke?” For me, the Platonic ideal version of this response is a rant that I saw a few years ago, from the streamer Negaoryx. Please follow this link and watch the video—it’s only two minutes and it is so worth it. While she’s streaming a game, someone comes into her Twitch chat, and asks her “what color is your thong today?” She proceeds to launch into a diatribe about how misogynistic and infantile this is, only for the original poster to tell her that she “can’t take a joke,” which she then folds into her rant, citing a comedian’s routine about this very problem. And she does all of this without pausing the game she’s playing. Seriously, this woman is a hero.
While it’s perhaps trivial to watch a teenager receive his comeuppance in Twitch chat, the point that Negaoryx makes is crucial. Irony allows us to toggle between positions, and too often, that’s used as a bad faith strategy to avoid blame or responsibility for the things that we say and do. Roland Barthes, about whom I wrote a couple of months ago, claimed that toggling was an important strategy for those of us who wanted to be able to understand and critique the appeal of social myths, but the word he uses to describe the way that myths operate is alibi, which is appropriate here. Etymologically, it translates as “at another place” or “elsewhere”; legally, to have an alibi is to demonstrate one’s innocence: “I couldn’t have committed the crime because I was elsewhere at the time.” In measured doses, irony can allow us to transcend our partiality (that’s the passage from Thomas Nagel that I cited earlier this week), but when it becomes our rhetorical modus operandi, it allows us to avoid ever being pinned down to a particular position, to never face accountability for the things we say. Did I say something wrong? I was just joking.
Taken to its extreme, irony permits the “seriously, not literally” attitude that has infected so much of our political scene (and so much more of it than I think we generally realize). Jen Mercieca’s thread on Twitter provides a perfect example of how this ironic stance plays out in our courts—not only did TFG’s speech on January 6th incite a mob to riot, but he clearly ad-lib revised it in the moment to make it more “incite-ful.” But of course, his lawyers argue that he didn’t really intend those consequences. Fox News’s defense of Tucker Carlson was that he couldn’t be held accountable for slander, because no one in their right mind would have believed him:
In written briefs, they cited previous rulings to argue Carlson's words were "loose, figurative or hyperbolic." They took note of a nonjournalist's use of the word "extort," which proved nondefamatory because it was mere "rhetorical hyperbole, a vigorous epithet."
(Fortunately, this strategy didn’t fly during the recent Dominion lawsuit, although internal communication that said the quiet part out loud may have been the only thing to stop them from trying.)
“Just joking,” whether we dismiss it as teasing, or hyperbole, or trolling, eats away ar our collective trust. It becomes a matter of self-preservation to simply assume everything is fake, as Riesman puts it. Fool me twice, shame on me. Instead of weighing different positions, and trusting that the people staking them out are doing so in good faith, it becomes far easier to simply go with the ones that reinforce our prior beliefs. And in what is itself an ironic twist, the less trusting we are, the easier it becomes for bad actors (whom we shouldn’t trust) to manipulate us. And I do mean all of us—this is not a strategy exclusive to one politician, one party, or one end of the political spectrum.
In that piece from Kirsten Powers that I quoted at the beginning of that post, she writes about the “military-grade armor” that she had to develop to exist in that world.
Well, as my armor came off, I started to take things more seriously. The “who’s up, who’s down” politics-as-sports analysis made me angry. Listening to “both sides” arguments made me want to claw my eyes out.
As she points out in the very next paragraph, though, this kind of seriousness makes one a target. It’s not enough to “get the joke.” The people who have sold out to it, who make their livings from it, will do everything in their power to keep others from calling it out and expose it for the social bankruptcy it promotes.
Cheery thoughts, I know, as we head into the weekend. But my thoughts about irony are beginning to crystallize a bit, and that’s ultimately a good thing.