SOMETIMES I REALLY JUST WANT YOU TO CHOKE TO DEATH ON YOUR OWN MISJUDGED IRONY
I am very well aware that beginning anything with the phrase ‘there are two kinds of people in the world’ is to readers what chewing tin foil is to teeth. It is the kind of lexicographic crime so heinous that I am sure you are tearing apart this very magazine right now or, if you are reading this online, you have just hurled your computer so hard through your wall that it is mere minutes away from completing its circle of the Earth to bop you on the enraged noggin. I know this, I know it’s shit and I’m sorry, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the people who think they are hilarious but aren’t, and there are the people who think they are profound but aren’t.
Your problem is that you are both. And you are both because everyone is both. Just because there are two kinds of people in the world, that doesn’t stop everyone being either and both of them. It is your sense of humour that I want to talk about this week. See this collision of your twin beliefs in both your own hilarity and profundity have resulted in you being horrifically boring and deeply unamusing.
You already know that you live your life in quotation marks, you exist at a self-enforced remove from everyone and everything around you. How this and your being both kinds of people manifests most obviously is in your bland over-reliance on irony and sarcasm. You know what’d make something funny? Stating the opposite of it. Want to be edgy? Express a view that you know is not only incorrect but also is deeply offensive.
You think you subvert the world. You think you are rye and dark. You think that you are forcing people to think outside of their own paradigms. You are an iconoclast. Remember that rape joke you told? The one about how they’re like windscreen wipers? You were totally just being ironic. You were subverting the hell out of that shit. Anyone who was listening was either never surer of your abhorrence towards sexual violence or just having all their preconceptions about whether men should ask before putin’ in they pee-pees blown out of their minds like the scum they are. Right? That is what you think. You already know that saying shit like that is bad, wrong, and promotes all kinds of horribleness. What you need to be told is that knowing that while still doing it to get jollies and giggles from the wrongness of it is not an acceptable action either.
You keep justifying your horrible jokes and persistent negativity to yourself. You have so many reasons and intellectualisations for how, well, really, of course, you don’t really mean it and no one would really think that you thought those things, that you’re even starting to believe them yourself. Well, guess what? Shut your mouth until you have something to say that is actually worth saying. We’ve gone over this before and we will go over it again, but sometimes you just really need to clamp your gnashers together. Seriously. Every single time you have to convince yourself that what you have done or said
in the case of your snarky mouth-death, is okay rather than just knowing it is, well, that’s a sign that you’re doing something that isn’t. So you need to train yourself out of that. You actually have to, if you are going to become anything approaching an actual human being. People can be funny without shitting on other people or being horrific, and people can be smart without being stroppy snarky little meat-wallets. Even you could be.