David Denby. Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining our Conversation. Simon and Schuster, 2009.
David Denby is hunting snark. He takes us on a safari of contemporary snarkland, found on blogs, Facebook and Twitter, in the media and all over the Internet. Snark is becoming a standard posture in conversations and public discourse. Snarkland isn’t pretty. To quote the Sex Pistols, it’s “pretty vacant.”
Snark is an attempt at humour that is mean-spirited, personal, pointless, and without any contribution to the public interest. In Snarkland, comedy is more important than truth, public welfare, or good policy. And the comedy isn’t very funny: “It’s the bad kind of invective – low, teasing, snide, condescending, knowing…”
Snark’s point: to attack, attack, attack. Its target: individuals through character assassination, not policies or programs. Its aim: to be funny while trying to seem intelligent, to try to sound like the smartest person in the room without any actual mental effort. The result: sad, vacuous mush, “a verbal bridge to nowhere.” For Denby, it is the lazy person’s way of talking; sound smart while saying nothing, avoiding thinking or standing for something while acidly becoming corrosive. He argues that “Snark doesn’t create a new image, a new idea. It’s parasitic, referential, insinuating.”
Denby’s work here is valuable in several ways. It puts snark under a much-needed spotlight, which may give hearers more courage to reject it and certainly more competence in identifying it. He also helps us examine the value of comedy in the public arena, offering lines of demarcation between snark and irony, satire, spoof, lampoon, burlesque, hate speech, and political correctness.
Denby gives us a fascinating history of snark, starting with the Greeks (Archilochus and Hipponax), then forward to the Romans (maybe Cicero and Juvenal for sure), 19th Century Oxford (Lewis Carroll gets innocently caught up in this for obvious reasons) and 20th Century Britain and America (Private Eye magazine, Tom Wolfe, Spy magazine, Maureen Dowd, David Letterman, and a cavalcade of contemporaries).
There are also nine principles of snark which help fill in the map. The principles would be easily recognizable in logic as fallacies of reasoning. For example, the fourth principles concerns mud throwing: “Assume anything negative said about someone with power is true – or at least usable.” There is a reason that these fallacies have been used over and over again since the sophists…they work if you don’t bother to think. Denby is dead-on here!
He is less reliable in labeling snarkiness. The book has inconsistent and partisan discoveries. For example, conservatives are more snarky than liberals; Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are not snarkmasters; McCain was, Obama wasn’t; the Republican Convention was, the Democratic Convention gets a pass…you can see the pattern.
Snark may be distorting, even destroying any search for truth. It offers us nothing as a replacement to responsible discourse. It is nasty, brutish, and stupid. We all pay the price when we avoid a serious discussion of our problems, which should include comedy that makes a powerful point as part of the discussion (think about how Milan Kundera used comedy to attack totalitarianism…of course, the snarker will now say something personal and petty about Kundera and bypass the point).
Yet, Snark may be self-defeating. Denby ends one chapter with this insight: “Scratch a writer of snark, and you find a media-age conformist and an aesthetic non-entity. Recognizing no standard but celebrity, indifferent to originality or to quality, snark may be out-of-date or fading almost as soon as it’s filed (or posted). The media are always moving, like time itself, and snark becomes time’s fool – it has to scramble to keep up. Perhaps that’s one reason why writers of snark seem so bitter: They know they are cutting the path of their own extinction.”
John Shosky
Roncalli Communications
Alexandria, Virginia