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| Inspirational
Irony A couple of years ago it briefly became the conventional wisdom that irony was over. It was the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, my old friend and Spy magazine co-founder Graydon Carter, who made the pronouncement -- "irony is dead" -- to a New York Times reporter. At the time, right after September 11, the understandable feeling was that cultural life had suddenly and maybe permanently become a very solemn affair. But then a few months later, after the depressing and discombobulating initial trauma of 9/11 had passed, Graydon felt obliged to say to a different reporter: I meant to say IRONING is dead -- not 'irony,' IRONING. In other words, real but absolutely ironic retraction. And I realized this week that the 20-year-old Age of Irony not only resumed, it may have picked up momentum... ...I read about a new Off-Off Broadway show that opened last week for a limited run called, "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant." It's an hour-long retelling of the actual biography of L. Ron Hubbard, the late writer who dreamed up the religion Scientology in the 1950s. The show, presented more or less in the form of a children's nativity pageant, is performed by a cast of actual children. The writer and director of the show concedes that it's a "deeply ironic concept" but claims it does not mock the church of Scientology. He says it's "a celebration of sorts" -- emphasis, I believe, on "of sorts," as with all such irony-fests. The local president of the historically quite litigious Church of Scientology has made litigious noises about "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant." "In general," Reverend John Carmichael told the New York Times, "I don't think you should ridicule a religion that helps people." I don't believe the Reverend Carmichael was speaking ironically. This is
Kurt Anderson in Studio 360. |
