Sarcasm: the final frontier

Traffic light - greenOne thing I’ve been pondering about this evening…

I write a lot of sarky, piss-taking posts on this blog. Sometimes I’ll have a rant about something that I’m not being entirely serious about but which lets off a bit of steam.

The thing is though, what often happens is people take me rather too seriously. Worse, I often kind of forget that I was only really being half-serious at the time and set about defending myself as if it was the most important point of principle ever.

So, to try and ameliorate this, should I include some kind of traffic light system to remind both myself and the reader what my state of mind was when I wrote each article? And how could I stop myself from sarcastically mis-labeling certain blog posts in the interests of winding people up? Is this Hell?

I’m reminded of one of my favourite Simpsons moments:

Teen1: Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He’s cool.
Teen2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen1: I don’t even know anymore.

3 comments

  1. Maybe you should look at, rather than a traffic-light based system of sarcastic policy, moving on to a much more advanced, nuanced and multi-layered coded system of sarcasm warning:

    * Low – sarcasm is unlikely

    * Moderate – sarcasm is possible, but not likely

    * Substantial – sarcasm is a strong possibility

    * Severe – sarcasm is highly likely

    * Critical – sarcasm is expected imminently

    The problem is, of course, that you might breach Crown copyright: http://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/Page45.html

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