WELCOME TO THE...Meh...

Sarcasm and the Death of Meaning

It’s the piano that snags you. Tumbling arpeggios trip a sense-memory, tipping toward consciousness. Then the ersatz-Sinatra starts singing and you know: Welcome to the Jungle, Guns n’Roses’ roaring opener from Appetite for Destruction, has been dressed-up in cocktail-lounge swing and used as an advertising jingle. Crooner and piano cruise among casino patrons; blackjack; showgirls; glamour from a bygone age. Everyone’s having a high old time...

The purest definition of irony is: a rhetorical device where the literal is opposite to the intended meaning. It is more commonly understood in the colloquial sense of being “seemingly mocked by fate”. This second definition stems from the first. We think we’re headed one way, but our own actions or decisions take us quite another; the resulting emotion, filtered through the rational mind, presents itself as a profound sense of being oddly opposite to where we should be - our literal is opposite to our intended state.

We sometimes hear that certain people – usually our North-American cousins – just don’t get irony (no word yet on whether the irony embargo extends above the forty-ninth parallel). Idle generalisations aside, it might be more instructive to ask: does anybody get irony anymore? Has anyone even seen it lately? We see a lot of sarcasm, but that’s not quite the same thing. Irony has a range of functions, not least to amuse and instruct; sarcasm is useful strictly for wounding, belittling, or to score easy points; it’s the recourse of a limited or a lazy mind struggling to appear clever – the intellectual equivalent of glassing someone in a bar.

One effect of sarcasm as a default position is the erosion of meaning; it also engenders a paranoiac attack-as-defence mentality. And it’s addictive. We forsake the careful analysis and expression of ideas for the cheap high of a snappy sound bite; each surrender makes the next more likely as the critical faculties atrophy. A feedback loop develops. Like a tyrant relying on force over diplomacy, aggression begets only aggression and misunderstanding, while nuance is lost. It’s not unusual nowadays to overhear, or participate in a conversation where nobody – including the speaker – is certain what’s being said. This need not trouble us if we’re happy with technology for company. If, however, we aspire to fruitful relationships with actual human beings, then the ability to each comprehend what the other expresses; to process how we think and feel about it; and to formulate a response and consider its likely impact are all reasonably important.

At a larger scale even irony, used indiscriminately, can similarly affect meaning. We see this in post-modern art, and increasingly in social and political satire (hello, Chaser guys). These are very often funny - in places – but then, fire a machine-gun into a crowd and you’re bound to hit something. When everything is a target, nothing has value. It’s a dance, and there must be more than the one rhetorical step in the repertoire. Overusing irony debases its currency; taking cheap shots instead of taking a position is little better than sarcasm as art-form. In either case, the net result is cynicism and cultural vandalism.

...All of which brings us back to that casino; that commercial; that song.

Ignore the glitz and the glamour, the singing cantaloupe in dinner-suit and sunglasses, all stock ingredients for a casino ad; listen to that song. Yes, it’s played in a different style, but the lyrics are unchanged: if you’ve got the money, honey, we’ve got your disease in the jungle/ Welcome to the jungle, watch it bring you to your knees. Now, few are unaware of the resources devoted by the advertising industry to market research. This includes minute, intensive study of human psychology. If these lyrics weren’t altered or omitted, it’s for one, simple reason: they didn’t have to be.

Ad execs, in a nation undertaking a protracted self-examination over access and attitudes to gambling, knew that they’d simply slip underneath the radar. Anybody unfamiliar with the song will tune out after the first line – ...we’ve got fun and games – those who know it will probably think of good times, rock n’ roll, their youth. In any event, the literal meaning of the language is lost to flash-card images, short attention spans, and over-active neural pleasure pathways. And breathtaking, monumental cynicism wins again. At least the commercial’s tag-line is right – there will be stories.

A world whose technology communicates with the edges of the galaxy, yet whose people struggle to communicate face to face; a song dedicated to warning the naive against exploitation, subverted to sell gambling to addicts; a civilisation built on the search for knowledge slowly abandoning meaning. All these, some would say are - in the broad sense - ironic.