David Denby's "Snark"

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on March 18th, 2009

David Denby is the New Yorker’s film critic. (Can you think of a more prodigious source of worthless hot air? Oops… sorry… that was… Snark-y!) And he’s written a thin book in which he seeks to identify what is snark, what is not snark and why that which is snark is “ruining our conversation.”

Denby is the sort of bloated, fussy douchbag that would never be caught dead in a comedy club. (And if he were to find himself in a comedy club, he’d sit in the front row and check his watch a lot and wince frequently.)

Read this, from Walter Kirn’s review of it in the NYT:

He wants to correct and restrain, using scholarship and logic, perhaps the keenest, most reflexive, prehistoric and anarchic of simple human pleasures, short of eating or achieving orgasm. The act of laughter, this would be. Or, for Denby, the act of low, illicit laughter– laughter enjoyed for the wrong reasons and provoked by the wrong lines. Whether laughter for the right reasons is even possible, given humor’s subversive, corrosive history, is a difficult philosophical question, of course, but Denby feels that it is. This follows from his belief that the impulses to giggle, grin and cackle (and the various means for stimulating these impulses) can be, and ought to be, consciously aligned with civic virtues and literary standards, lest our society laugh for no just cause, at jokes that aren’t witty enough to laugh at and that may even be plain stupid and malicious.

The humor that stirs this wrongful laughter is “snark…”

Emphasis ours.

It is more than ironic that Denby, in attempting to warn us all as to what is “ruining our converstation,” has instead exposed himself (and his ridiculous mode of thinking) as one of the major forces that is seeking to curtail the conversation.

In the course of producing this website over the past decade, we’ve come across dozens of Denby’s– folks who seek to corral or suppress certain kinds of humor, or who seek to shame whole audiences from laughing at certain kinds of humor or certain kinds of comics or certain comics.

Denby has let the cat out of the bag. Kirn hits the nail on the head when he says that Denby (and like-minded folks) think that laughter “ought to be consciously aligned with civic virtues and literary standards.” This is the central inconsistency in their crusade. Humor quite often is at odds with civic virtues and literary standards.

Read Kirn’s entire review. And also take in Mark Steyn’s excellent take down in Commentary.

Consider this a review of the reviews. (Here’s another from the Balto Sun. And another devastating one from Wonkette.) We’re not going to actually buy the book. We know what’s between those covers… we’ve been dealing with the David Denby’s of the world, honing our snark skills to a fine point, since 1999.

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