I Bite My Thumb at Thee*

One of my many faults (gasp! I am not perfect, oh no!) is that I clutch onto grudges with my sticky, pissy little fingers until my dying day, and I mull over these grudges and their circumstances continuously until they are imprinted into my mind the same as should be the alphabet.  Lately, I have been thinking about the time I was rebuked for my sarcastic attitude.  Nay, not sarcastic attitude, but more like a sarcastic sense of humor with a spicy touch of sardonicism.

When asked to characterize the perfect significant other or good friend, I am pretty sure that no one would prefer for the person to LACK a sense of humor.  Perhaps not always the first quality listed, it usually makes the cut…eventually following rich, handsome, boobs, hot, or dependable, nice, and fun.  However, not all humorous sixth senses register as equal on the laugh-o-meter, and the preferred type of funny remains a subjective matter.  Not everyone prefers puns to sarcasm or corny jokes to references, but does that mean that a quantitative population of people could entirely dislike a specific type of humor, i.e. sarcasm and sardonicism?   

Apparently so since Thomas Carlyle, a nineteenth Scottish historian, claimed, “Sarcasm is the language of the devil, for which reason I have long since so good as denounced it.”  Ouch.  Not strongly opinionated at all.

I have had run-ins with quite a few people who find my comments disrespectful and offensive.  Unfortunately I cannot remember the exact wording of the harsh words spoken to me in my tender junior high years, but I do remember the meanie was a high school boy quite unimpressed by my repartee.  We were at a pool party, and I believe I might have said something to the effect of “Ha! That was an amazing hit” in reference to his attempted serve over a volleyball net.  He said something similar to “You should really stop it with the sarcasm.  People don’t like it, and it’s rude.”

This really hurt.  He did not allude to one person’s opinion of my humor, but people’s opinions.  He generalized.  I was mature, smart, and confident enough to recognize the generalization, but I could not completely fend off the broken feelings that usually accompany being told that a large fraction of one’s personality is undesirable.  Sarcasm and sardonicism are not lousy tricks I pull from my back pocket in a desperate moment; they define me, a part of me that I strongly embrace, and are heavily interwoven into my literary voice.

Furthermore, my automatically generated commentary spews from my brain to mouth for the sole purpose of intellectual humor, not to degrade or belittle by any means.  After all, had I wanted to be condescending, I could have just recounted the truth: “That serve sucked.”  But this judgmental boy brings to question the general public’s perception of sarcasm.  Ignoring sardonicism for ease of discussion and narrowing our lens to that of sarcasm, is it considered offensive and disrespectful outside of the snotty collegiate student realm?

Perhaps the perspective changes between generations or regions, same as addressing one’s elders as “sir” and “ma’am”.  Truly in my opinion, calling a woman “ma’am” should be considered the cruelest of all insults, considering the person could not bother to take the time to pronounce the full “madam”.  I obviously respond only to “mademoiselle”.  This demonstrates (loosely) that the rhetoric of respect or lack thereof exists in the eye of the beholder.  Language remains a flexible vehicle of communication, traveling extensively across endless terrain and acquiring a plethora of idioms along the way.  As the vernacular changes, so does the expression of humor.  Nevertheless, in this new generation to which I belong, I still seem to find resistance to my form of wit.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky defined sarcasm as the “last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded”.  I do not disagree that some may resort to sarcastic remarks for this purpose, but I honestly cannot recall an instance that I used sarcasm in this manner.  As natural as sarcasm comes to me, I use it flippantly not defensively.  But I cannot speak for the whole of the planet on the common use of sarcasm.  Perhaps majority of the people fall onto sarcasm in desperation for a red herring or to belittle another.  Perhaps the general motive is to be acerbic rather than cunning.  In fact the Sarcasm Society boldly describes their namesake as such:

never [...] gentle or endearing, but rather as caustic and bitter, describing situations, persons, or things in a derogatory way in order to be funny. Appropriately, the derivations for this brutal form of wit come from the Latin ’sarcasmus,” which stems from the Greek “sarkasmos” and “sarkazein” which means literally “to bite the lips in rage.” [...] Throughout much of history sarcasm was considered a “lower form” of wit because it was considered so unabashedly disrespectful to the person or object being described.

 

 

Nevertheless, assuming the existence of proper context clues, should the phrasing of intentions be judged if the intentions themselves are pure?  I cannot answer this question, and I have no right to attempt as much.  I can promise, though, that the insanely loud sarcastic and sardonic demon controlling the neural communication wires of my brain will never surrender to an alternate form of humor.  Or perhaps I should move to Britain, where people celebrate an extensive history of sarcasm.  

*Not that I consider Shakespeare to be “urban” but this phrase is actually in the Urban Dictionary.  And you thought I failed to include UD in this post. Ha! And yes, I know that is not the actual line.