Thursday, March 13, 2008
What do you really think?
Stephen Fry , God bless him, has set out to right a stereotype.
[F]orgive a detour here, but if there is one misapprehension about Americans that annoys me more than any other, it is the lofty claim, usually made by the most dim-witted and wit-free Britons, that America is an — ho-ho — “irony free zone”. Let it be established here, this day, that no one, on pain of being designated fifty types of watery twat, ever dare repeat that feeble, ignorant, self-satisfied canard ever ever again. Americans are no more irony illiterate than Britons or anyone else and the repeated assertion (and it is no more than an assertion not a demonstrable provable fact) is no more than a pathetic symbol of a certain kind of Briton’s flabby need to convince themselves of their sophisticated superiority over the average American. Now, don’t feel bad about the fact that you, dear listener/reader have, at some point in the past been guilty of repeating and transmitting this feeble myth, we all have. It’s lazy, easy and gives us a warm glow. My war on the lie begins now, and is not retrospective, so you need not feel ashamed. Only promise never to repeat it. Actually, even if you think it’s true, have the grace to recognise that such a clunking, tedious, oft-repeated cliché is so dull and well-worn that it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, it’s just plain tedious and only bar-stool bores and dull-witted gibbons would ever think it worth trotting out. Besides, it is ugly, graceless and rude.
and how about this for a preamble:
I know that much of what I am about to say is wild exaggeration, but bear with me. I want to address a terror that lurks within me, a huge beast on my back, a great maggot in my brain. You cannot expect too much rational talk from a fellow who is unburdening himself of his deepest fears.
Every Stephen Fry 'blessay' is a journey. You never know quite where it'll take you, but the ride is always interesting. He uses this talent (and satirizes himself a bit) to great humorous advantage here:
Frankly, Yanks sometimes feel inferior because Britain seems to turn out people like these two...
2 Comments:
By 
MEANA55, at
Fri Mar 14, 03:41:00 PM:
I suspect that the irony "problem" is a matter of too much irony:
1. Leisure on as grand a scale as we enjoy is fairly new to mankind
2. We fill our leisure hours with entertainment
3. Much of successful entertainment centers on irony
4. The availability heuristic causes people to overestimate the irony of the world
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." The soul of Princess Leia's irony was that the Empire's crackdown to maintain dominance will inspire more resistance. This makes for good space opera, but the reality on planet earth was that Soviet armor rolled through Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, and the rest of the Eastern Bloc shut the hell up until Solidarity succeeded about the same time that the USSR collapsed.
I think of this whenever I hear people assert that the War in Iraq creates more terrorists.
I guess I had better not sell my watch to buy combs for my wife since I just know that she's going to sell her hair to buy me a watch chain.
By 
, at
Sun Mar 16, 05:13:00 PM:
I guess I had better not sell my watch to buy combs for my wife since I just know that she's going to sell her hair to buy me a watch chain.
But if you did and you didn't, damn but what that wouldn't make a good story.
