UK paperback

Snark

Hunting high and low

Rummaging through my virtual drawers, I find this book review that I wrote last autumn, which didn’t make it into the paper. I reproduce it here as a public service, so that anyone who might otherwise have been tempted to buy the book in question will save their money in these difficult times.

Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation
by David Denby (128pp, Picador, £9.99)

In the miniature footsteps of Harry G Frankfurt’s On Bullshit ((Which I reviewed for the Guardian in 2005. I can’t find that review online, so here it is:

On Bullshit, by Harry G Frankfurt (Princeton, £6.50)
It might help to be “one of the world’s most influential moral philosophers” if you plan to get away with having a longish newspaper article published between hard covers as a book. Even this nanotome takes a curiously lassitudinous approach, diffidently circling the subject and constantly pausing to tell us what it will do next. Purporting to be inspired by the lack of a “theory” of bullshit, it is more of an etymological stroll, which ends up arguing, by my count, exactly one thing, viz: “The bullshitter […] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

Oops, I’ve given away the ending. (Well, not quite; there remains a the-world-is-going-to-the-dogs peroration.) I hesitate to say that anyone might write this who had an idle afternoon and a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. Still, it takes no more than 15 minutes to read, and a stroppy sort may well end up considering it an example of what it’s talking about.

)) comes another super-slender monolinguograph, with New Yorker film critic Denby expatiating on snarkiness, a mode of derisive humour. At least, that’s what I think it is. Denby has gone and made up his own definition: that snark is personal abuse. An American comic is quoted as saying: “Obama did great in February, and that’s because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary’s doing much better ’cause it’s White Bitch Month, right?” Snark, Denby cries. No: that’s just sheer dumb nastiness.

According to Merriam-Webster, “snarky” means “sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in manner”; a New Yorker friend of mine writes: “‘snark’ is piquant sarcasm, usually by a hipster type”. Undaunted by actual usage, Denby insists that snark is mere invective (“creepy nastiness”, “dull slagging”). He spends a lot of time on coded Republican attacks on Obama: nope, not snark. If a joke is actually funny, on the other hand, Denby won’t allow it as snark: it becomes “wit” (cf Gore Vidal), or at least “higher snark”. This enables Denby to don a schoolmasterly cap and rank great satirists: Swift’s “snark-free” A Modest Proposal comes top, followed by Pope’s Dunciad (contains traces of snark), with Juvenal slouching up at the rear, “a genius of snark”. You can try this sort of thing at home, picking any random handful of writers; I didn’t.

Essentially, it turns out that snark is anything that offends Denby’s private sense of decorum and cultural hierarchy. Private Eye once took the piss out of the Beatles (“But really — the Beatles?” Denby splutters); and Joe Queenan said something unkind about the actress Shelley Winters, who Denby gallantly ripostes was “a luscious knockout for years”. Denby writes that “snark has its priggish tones”, and he should know. Look at all these young bloggers being wittily derisive! Why won’t they learn to respect their elders and betters? Denby confesses approval of “vituperation that is insulting, nasty, but, well, clean” — signalling with that flailing, comma-buttressed “well”, and the desperate italics, that he still can’t say exactly what he is objecting to, except that he knows it when he sees it.

An entire chapter of his own melancholically unfunny book, meanwhile, has been devoted to attacking the Washington Post New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd — she was wrong to mock the Bush administration, you see, because her mockery didn’t actually make the Bush administration go away — and Denby has argued that snark goes hand-in-hand with irresponsibility, anonymity and hatred of idiosyncrasy, which will be news to anyone who appreciates the state-of-the-art snark of a website such as The Awl. Perhaps Denby has been so pained by what he has encountered online (at least via the person he thanks for doing “some Internet research”) that he can’t bear to go back there any more. A happy ending all round, then.

17 comments
  1. 1  NomadUK  January 12, 2010, 9:47 am 

    Well, to be fair, it’s hard to get too upset at anyone who devotes an entire chapter to slamming Maureen Dowd.

  2. 2  Peter Robins  January 12, 2010, 3:01 pm 

    On the other hand, are we allowed to get upset at the idea that Dowd works for the Washington Post?

  3. 3  Steven  January 12, 2010, 3:09 pm 

    My bad!

  4. 4  NomadUK  January 12, 2010, 6:13 pm 

    It’s certainly permissible to get upset at the idea that Dowd works for any newspaper at all.

  5. 5  sw  January 12, 2010, 7:12 pm 

    Thank you for posting this – I had been looking forward to your review of this book and was disappointed that it had not yet appeared . . . I am no longer disappointed?

    Frankly, the conversation I have been having with Denby in my head has not been ruined by “snark” (I assume that’s the conversation he’s referring to in the subtitle to his book?). But now I’m worried he’s taking it personally.

    “Obama did great in February, and that’s because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary’s doing much better ’cause it’s White Bitch Month, right?” Snark, Denby cries. No: that’s just sheer dumb nastiness.

    I certainly agree that this does not appear to be an example of “snark”, however it is defined; it certainly sounds like it might be an example of “sheer dumb nastiness”. And I would be willing to agree with you if you were to say that the onus would be on the comic to demonstrate that it is something more than “sheer dumb nastiness”, but I would be curious about who said it and how it was said. Again, I’m not saying it’s not “nasty” – but sometimes things that are “nasty” are something more than “sheer dumb nastiness”? Especially with that lingering “right?”

    Plus, I begin to like the idea of “White Bitch Month”: not only for Hillary Clinton or Ann Coulter, but also as a celebration of such things as Gossip Girl and for the White Bitch in all of us.

    Just saying.

  6. 6  Steven  January 12, 2010, 7:25 pm 

    I would be curious about who said it and how it was said

    Not curious enough to google it, though?

    Just saying!

  7. 7  sw  January 12, 2010, 8:33 pm 

    Ah! Yes, I was! But I was at a snarky little coffee shop with a snarky internet connection and it took me like three hours to get my comment through, so though I was tremendously curious, I couldn’t bring myself to spend another two hours locating the author of this nasty, nasty quip.

    But now I have a decent connection . . .

    Whoah, turns out it was none other than Penn Jillette! Who I adore! He is certainly one of the most brilliant and nasty comics-cum-magicians I’ve run across. But then he’s the only one I’ve spotted in the middle of the road while driving. Ba-da-boom?

  8. 8  Euripides  January 12, 2010, 8:43 pm 

    “For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm,
    Yet I feel it my duty to say,
    Some are Boojums—” The Bellman broke off in alarm,
    For the Baker had fainted away.

  9. 9  Steven  January 12, 2010, 9:02 pm 

    It’s interesting to compare the version of Jillette’s “joke” cited by Denby (which Jillette “told” on MSNBC live) with the version on his webcast?

    “Obama is just creaming Hillary. You know, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it’s not fair, because they’re being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there’s no White Bitch Month.”

  10. 10  sw  January 12, 2010, 10:55 pm 

    How so?

  11. 11  Steven  January 13, 2010, 1:22 am 

    I wish there were an expert on comedy around to tell us?

  12. 12  hardindr  January 14, 2010, 3:35 am 

    Whoah, turns out it was none other than Penn Jillette! Who I adore! He is certainly one of the most brilliant and nasty comics-cum-magicians I’ve run across. But then he’s the only one I’ve spotted in the middle of the road while driving. Ba-da-boom?

    I agree that Jillette is an excellent magician (if you are in Vegas, you should see his show with Teller), but he is a pretty big jerk, cf http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/20.....13598.html , and selective in his application of skepticism http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/20.....11104.html . The Hillary crack is particularly nasty, Maureen Dowd is an ass for putting it in her column, in my opinion http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh021308.shtml . Snark is mostly used by writers to paper over when they don’t have anything useful to say.

  13. 13  sw  January 14, 2010, 4:53 pm 

    I never said he wasn’t a dick. Sheesh!

    Snark is mostly used by writers to paper over when they don’t have anything useful to say.

    Come on! Really? How often do writers ever have anything “useful” to say? When I want snark, I go to writers; when I want usefulness, I reach down for the hammer I carry in my belt.

  14. 14  hardindr  January 14, 2010, 7:52 pm 

    How often do writers ever have anything “useful” to say?

    Why bother reading then, this blog or anything else? Hammers are useful, but they don’t help you with thinking, unless you want to be unconscious.

  15. 15  Steven  January 14, 2010, 7:59 pm 

    A hammer is useful for philosophizing, or so I hear.

  16. 16  hardindr  January 14, 2010, 8:38 pm 

    Philosophy toolkit here. Doesn’t include a hammer, though.

  17. 17  sw  January 14, 2010, 9:16 pm 

    Why bother reading then, this blog or anything else?

    Do you know how often I ask myself this?

    So “thinking” is synonymous with “useful”?

    *bashes table with hammer, makes employees startle, wake up, and get back to work.



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