For those fcrp readers who aren’t regular readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education—c’mon, I know you’re out there—I bring you this story from the groves of academe. Pop quiz: Where is Drake University? Why, it’s located “at the northeast edge of Des Moines,” the web page tells us, with no apparent sense of irony [...]
On Friday, discussing the public service announcement “Moms With Guns,” I trailed off by talking about the dangers of irony for conveying important political or social content. I’m a big fan of irony, as colleagues and friends know; but it’s a notoriously unreliable weapon—the Saturday-night special of rhetorical devices—and if you come packin’, you’d better [...]
Exaggerated claims are often made for ironic advertising being one of the distinctive cultural forms of our times; the “Think Small” Volkswagen ads from the early 1960s are usually adduced as the first sightings of this kind of counterintuitive sales pitch. Researchers need to turn the pages back at least another century, though, to see [...]
Thanks to Steve Long, who filled in for me yesterday while I was “having work done,” as we say here in L.A. Today I’m recuperating, and craving comfort food. Truth be told, I always crave comfort food; but I’m now officially “recuperating,” so that folks are actually encouraging me to eat comfort food. Plus, my [...]
With the spring semester now but a fond memory, I’m finally catching up on some of my homework. I think I’ve mentioned here that I taught a senior seminar called “Irony in the Public Sphere”; we were interested, mainly, in the sometimes spectacular ways that very compelling and intelligent ironic projects can misfire when they [...]
I dropped the story of Ice-T and “Cop Killer” midway on Thursday, in deference to our regular Friday feature, Mystery Science Auditorium; let’s finish up that story now. The song was “greeted” with predictable, and not altogether unreasonable, outrage. Tipper Gore went after Body Count in The Washington Post, comparing Ice-T’s message to “Hitler’s anti-Semitism [...]
In today’s Mystery Science Auditorium, I invite you, Dear Reader, to watch a couple of commercials with me. It’s one of the great paradoxes of advertising: marketers make us trust them by acting utterly trustworthy (babies, American flags, puppies), except when they don’t—when they sell to us by acting completely untrustworthy. Phony. As Jennifer Wicke has argued [...]
With real regret I bid farewell Tuesday to my senior seminar students in “Irony in the Public Sphere.” They were a great class; the topic as I conceived it is a big, baggy one (which goes some way to explaining why the book is taking me so long to finish), and the students took my [...]
As some of you will know, I haven’t been at this blogging thing very long—2+ months and counting. So I’m not a reliable source yet on the life of the blogger, or the daily rhythm of blogging, though I’m starting to get a pretty good idea. And it does seem to me that in doing [...]
Wow. I’m teaching a senior seminar this semester on irony—on, especially, how tricky and unreliable irony becomes when it moves into the mass media in the second half of the twentieth century. Today, we talked about a very early episode of All in the Family, Norman Lear’s controversial 1970s sitcom that took on nearly every [...]