IRONY AND HUMOUR

Irony is tangential, it is skirting humour; an ironic joke is inventive, made on the spot, thus contextual. The humorous joke is rubbing it in, told for the umptieth time, preferable at the bar of a café, or during birthday parties. The humorous joke irons out the wrinkles of true, ironic fun. Irony courts mimesis: that which is the same and not the same – the IdeM of iDEm. Humour, by contrast, always copies; it appeals to the already shared, the already known, to common prejudice. Irony does not take life all too seriously, whereas humour in a roundabout way does.

Irony can be pictorial. Look at this magnificent self-portrait of Master Rembrandt with the expression on his face of “So, what…!” Perhaps, true irony is an old man’s prerogative.

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Son No. 2 sent me an app-message, obviously written from inside the Dutch truck he drives to earn a lot of money for his boss and a little for himself. From inside France Profonde I wrote back: “Boy of mine – at work today? Don’t you know that, at least, in Gallic Europe, it is the 15th of August!”

“It is the same in the Netherlands, Dad, the very same 15th of August. So, what!”

I wrote back – as always trying to make him laugh, as he always makes me laugh. After all, living in this miserable world of ours, you need to joke now and then:

“Dear Son of mine, you may think the 15th of August here is the same 15th of August as it is with you; however, the French insist – they beg to disagree, as does, more or less, a quarter of the world population: over here it is QUINZE AOUT – the day of Holy Mary’s elevation into the heavens…Nobody works; some have gone to church; many, however, celebrate this day with the obnoxious smell of barbecue meat and the loud voices of too many apéritifs taken too early.”

Sierksma, La Roche August 2018

Author: rjsiersk

Sierksma was born in Friesland, a 'county' in the northern part of the Netherlands with its own language which he does not speak and with an obstinate population to which he both belongs and does not belong. A retired Professor of Social Philosophy and Aesthetics, as a Harkness fellow he taught at Rutgers and Berkeley Universities in the USA, and at GUAmsterdam and TUDelft in the Netherlands. In 1991 he was awarded his PhD from Leiden University on the subject of 'Surveillance and Task: Labour Discipline between Utilitarianism and Pragmatism'. His books include Minima Memoria (1993), Lost View (2002 with Jan van Geest), and Litter Scent (2013). He has published poems and articles in Te Elfder Ure, Nynade, Oasis and the Architectural Annual. Half the year he lives in Haarlem, the other half he spends in la France Profonde, living ‘in his own words’ as the house out there was bought with the winnings from his essay Eternal Sin, written for the ECI Essay Prize (1993). In this blog, Sierksma's Sequences, written in English, he is peeping round his own and other people’s perspectives. Not easily satisfied with answers nor with questions, he turns his wry wit to a number of philosophical and historical issues. His aim in writing: to make parts of the objective world light up in his personal perspective - not my will, thine! Not being a thief, he has no cook, one wife, some children, one lover and three cats. The reader, interested in my writings on aesthetics, literature, and sociology, may want to open Academia.edu, where various pieces are published.

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