irony—exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are—is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.

Perversely, irony relies on some remains of cultural capital in order to coherently express its destructive message. If elevated beyond commentary and analysis to its own pedestal of artistic value, its essence become desacralization and the making trite of deep truths we might prefer to respect and conserve.

The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.