Irony in the Postmodern Age: Toward a Map of Suspensiveness

An Exploration of Post-Postmodern Political Irony in Contemporary American Late-Night Television Shows

“…Current studies surrounding the characteristics of post-postmodern irony have been largely focused on its existence within the wider scope of literature and the media. Few studies analyze the existence of post-postmodern irony in a specific form of medium, however, the studies that have explored the shifting use of irony as rhetoric from a general perspective of the media have suggested that post-postmodernist irony places a greater focus on the idea of utilizing authenticity and sincerity as a vehicle for political statements and the undermining of authority (Wallace, 1993;Leal, 2017). These studies generally view irony as a spectrum from satirical authenticity to satirical irony, meaning the utilization of sincerity to satirically undermine authority is still considered to be irony (Miller, 2009).…”

“…From the end of World War II to the arrival of the 21st century, political satire within the media featured heavy amounts of "government paranoia, disruption of language and narration, and a distrust of authority" (Leal, 2017). In this era, widely recognized as the "post-modern era," irony, originally simply defined as an in-congruency between the speaker's underlying and surface message, was widely utilized as a method of satirically undermining authority (Wilde, 1980). However, by the late 20th century "this tactic was overused and no longer effective" (Leal, 2017).…”

The ‘post’ in literary postmodernism

“…Whereas modernist irony is an 'equivocal irony' that secretly longs to transcend the ironic stance, the irony of Wilde's 'midfiction' is a 'suspensive irony', an irony of cautious assent, of tolerance -the 'tolerance … of a fundamental uncertainty about the meanings and relations of things in the world and in the universe'. 38 Wilde's 'midfiction', the 'tertium quid' of contemporary fiction, neither realist nor experimental, 39 anticipates, as we will see, Linda Hutcheon's influential 'historiographic metafiction', which will be discussed below, while his observation, in an earlier discussion of modern and postmodern irony, that Donald Barthelme 'puts aside the central modernist preoccupation with epistemology' and that his 'concerns are, rather, ontological in their acceptance of the world' 40 anticipates Brian McHale's distinction between an epistemologically oriented modernism and an ontologically oriented postmodernism. Wilde's notion of a 'midfiction' also has much in common with the 'problematic fiction' of David Lodge, who in the later 1970s had adopted the term postmodernism.…”