I’ve lived for a good 16 years, I’ve been to three continents, and I’ve met about a thousand or more people, but never have I met a person who appreciated sarcasm (or has cared enough about it to tell me so). I just don’t get it. To me, sarcasm is an art form, long lost in the bastard truncated language of today. All we hear around us are but poor excuses for sentences, their verbs ripped apart from theirs hearts, subjects and predicates, those most basic of conventions forgotten with nothing but viscera from what was once English scattered around us. And what smites me, fills me with unbearable ennui and makes me despise the very existence of these people is that none of them can claim ignorance or a lack of familiarity.
And what’s more, they have made me one of them. I was beset from the moment I rest my feet on the ground, and now I have fallen into their ambuscade. They have gnawed away at my brain in their sleep, until all but pieces of it rest in peace in their digestive tract. Not me, not me, CANNOT LAH!
I digress from the major topic. Sarcasm, or rather the practice of it, to me is the eternal pursuit of a balance, that equilibrium between truth and farce. The closest analogy I can come up with involves a thin string, two tall towers, and … nope, no bamboo or long wooden pole. In order to be truly successful at it, one must be able to judge the point where it becomes too convincing that your audience begins to believe you, and the where it becomes too far from the truth, that it becomes merely another insult. This point depends not only on your subject, but also the level of comprehension of your listeners. I have, on multiple occasions, under or over-estimated the intellectual worth of people that I engage in conversation with, although curiously, the latter seems to be occurring far more frequently now.
And while I have often manage to infuse with humor many a tense situation with the use of this most noblest of pursuits, I am yet to meet someone who truly realized the beauty behind it. I am, therefore, cursed to walk this road, in this pursuit, forlorn and solitary until I meet that person.
P.S: I admit, that last line was riddled with clichés, and oddly poetic, but I just got my creative license renewed.
And what’s more, they have made me one of them. I was beset from the moment I rest my feet on the ground, and now I have fallen into their ambuscade. They have gnawed away at my brain in their sleep, until all but pieces of it rest in peace in their digestive tract. Not me, not me, CANNOT LAH!
I digress from the major topic. Sarcasm, or rather the practice of it, to me is the eternal pursuit of a balance, that equilibrium between truth and farce. The closest analogy I can come up with involves a thin string, two tall towers, and … nope, no bamboo or long wooden pole. In order to be truly successful at it, one must be able to judge the point where it becomes too convincing that your audience begins to believe you, and the where it becomes too far from the truth, that it becomes merely another insult. This point depends not only on your subject, but also the level of comprehension of your listeners. I have, on multiple occasions, under or over-estimated the intellectual worth of people that I engage in conversation with, although curiously, the latter seems to be occurring far more frequently now.
And while I have often manage to infuse with humor many a tense situation with the use of this most noblest of pursuits, I am yet to meet someone who truly realized the beauty behind it. I am, therefore, cursed to walk this road, in this pursuit, forlorn and solitary until I meet that person.
P.S: I admit, that last line was riddled with clichés, and oddly poetic, but I just got my creative license renewed.
