According to OED Online, the etymological root of “irony” is the "classical Latin īrōnīa form of wit in which one says the opposite of what one means, pretended ignorance (Cicero) < ancient Greek εἰρωνεία dissimulation, pretended ignorance < εἴρων dissembler, of unknown origin + -εία -y suffix3"
This root seems to refer primarily to verbal irony. The “pretended ignorance” in this definition feels very Socratic, and a Socratic root of irony actually seems to make a lot of sense – memers are often just as annoying as gadflies and definitely could be charged with corrupting the youth. The unexamined meme is not worth reposting, as it were.
If irony involves “saying the opposite of what one means”, then when one engages in irony, one is explicitly drawing a connection between the thing and its opposite. This demonstrates a deeper understanding of your own meaning– not only do you know what you mean, but you know what would be the opposite of what you mean.You also understand the juxtaposition of your meaning and its opposite to be humorous. In an ironic utterance, the statement or sentiment expressed both means what it says and means the opposite of what it says; the statement itself presents what you mean and what you don't mean as bounded up together, as part of each other. When we reach the level of post-irony, the thing that the thing is not is implicitly invoked but passed over: if you say "I believe X" post-ironically you are also invoking the ironic statement "I do not believe X" implicitly. The subsumption of meaning into non-meaning into meaning presents meaning and not meaning something, or not believing your disbelief in what you're saying, as interwoven sentiments wherein each level of avowal and disavowal inflects all of the other levels.
Post-irony may only be comprehensible to interlocutors who expect the ironic. Since what is expected is the ironic, uttering the opposite of the ironic thing becomes ironic. If a statement is post-ironic, you don’t not mean what you are saying. Importantly, this kind of layered meaning is not reducible – your meaning cannot just be expressed by canceling out the double negatives. Rather, the humor in the post-ironic comes from understanding the potential humorousness of the ironic statement, and then furthering the joke by reversing the ironic – being ironic about being ironic. JrEg calls post-irony a subversion of a subversion.
The Philosopher’s Meme is a website dealing with many topics related to memes and internet humor. They chart historical models of the development of memes over time. If we use their carefully plotted schema of ironic development in memes between 2010-2019, we can make a tentative claim that post-ironic humor was only able to form after ironic humor had become somewhat normalized.
I am not clear on the placement of “meta-ironic” within this diagram, as it seems to contradict all of the other scholarship and dialogue I have seen on the meta-ironic, including other articles on The Philosopher’s Meme itself. Putting this aside, if we go by this diagram, we see that post-ironic humor in memes emerged around 2019. The Twilight renaissance started around 2020, reaching its peak in 2021. If we look at the difference in response to Twilight between 2008-2012 (the years films were released) and 2020-2022 (rough span of the Twilight renaissance) we can see that both the reception of the film and the way people are being funny on the internet has vastly changed. What might we find if we looked at pieces of media and the way they were or were not taken up by people if we look at them alongside evolving trends and norms in humorous internet discourse?
Memes have a way of training us to respond to certain images and phrases in certain ways. We want to ‘get the joke’, so when we take in a meme we are not just consuming and attempting to understand one single image, we are becoming attuned to all the modalities of that format. Memes are iterative, with many many different uses of a single format. Generally, there is something that stays the same about how a specific format is used – the structure – and something that changes with different iterations – the content. If we take the ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ meme as an example, we can see that the visual-narrative of a man turning away from his outraged girlfriend to stare desiringly at another woman can be used to express the dynamic between all sorts of things one should be giving their attention to versus the thing one is actually giving their attention to.
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