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.

Satire in extreme times is risky. Choose any excess, think you’re wildly exaggerating, and it’s most likely to have been true. (Sympathetic murmur) I know.

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