The Art of the Ironist

Absurdity is an intrinsic quality of so many things that they only have to be touched to reveal it. The deadliest way to annihilate the unoriginal and the insincere is to let it speak of itself. Irony is this letting things speak for themselves and hang themselves with their own rope. Only, it repeats the words after the speaker, and adjusts the rope…. The ironical method might be compared to the acid that develops a photographic plate. It does not distort the image, but merely brings clearly to the light all that was implicit in the plate before…. Similarly the ironist insists always on seeing things as they are. He is a realist whom the grim satisfaction of seeing the truth compensates for any sordidness that it may bring along with it. Things as they are, thrown against the background of things as they ought to be, this is the ironist’s vision.

~ Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918 (Berkley: Univ. California Press, 1977), 32.