The Death Of Irony

One of my roommates brought back a joke from winter vacation that (nominally anyway) poked fun at US media coverage of natural disasters: "So did you hear about that tsunami? It's just so sad. There could be literally...dozens of Westerners who lost their lives." But lo and behold, our friend Bill O'Reilly spent the week after the tsunami going in-depth nightly on a mudslide in California that killed a couple dozen people. And CNN assembled a panel to address the question of whether or not a tsunami could happen in the United States (answer: no) [but that wouldn't stop the Bush DHS from allocating a few billion dollars for a tsunami prevention center in Cedar Rapids, IA--ed.]. What makes parody parody, I always thought, was its refraction of reality. The best parodies, it seemed to follow, were those at the slightest remove from reality. What to make of an epistemic arrangement in which parody and reality are indistinguishable?

Rather than answer that, I'll link to a couple of political cartoons that take up the problem from the other side, i.e. that of the satirist. Over here, Tom Toles takes a swipe at the Orwellian language games the Republicans are employing to advance their Social Security proposals. My question is, how is this in any way different from what actually passes for discourse about Social Security on the right? The substantive differences are clear, but is there a formal difference between the following?

• 1) believing that Oceania and Eastasia are allies at t0 and believing that Oceania and Eurasia are allies and have always been allies at t1 and
• 2) supporting "privatization" at t1 and opposing and having always opposed "privatization" at t2

If such a difference exists, I don't see it. More morally egregious, however, is the phenomenon Tom Tomorrow lampoons here. And to continue beating a dead horse, this is, allowing for stylistic variation, precisely how the activist right has been dealing with the torture scandal.

No one is readier than I am to criticize humorlessness on the left. But is it still possible to be funny when propositions that are self-evidently absurd are treated with gravity and reverence?