“Are you sure?”
My daughter’s response to my offer of help was typical of the way in which she responds to any gratuitous offer of help from me: She questioned whether I was sure that I wanted to do what I had told her that I would do. I ran a menu of responses through my social filters, which all collapsed before my response: “No. I don’t really want to help you because I’d really like to set fire to my nostril hairs and inhale the flames into my brain.” Of course, I did not say that to Lauren, though I have saved the response for someone not as close to me. Novelty T-shirts imprinted with the legend, “Sarcasm: Just another service we offer,” should comprise my daily uniform as a way of warning people of the dangers ahead, for sarcasm, the beast within me, is likely to rear its head at any time.
One of the definitions of sarcasm is “the use of irony to mock or convey contempt,” and that definition bothers me. I am mocking my daughter when she questions if I am “sure” that I want to gift her with a service, but I don’t intend to “convey contempt.” And I’m not trying to mock her in a mean way, but to “convey” to her that she need not question a gift, freely offered, from her father, for . . . ok. Calm now. I visited a website that described three reasons why people use sarcasm: insecurity, latent anger, and social awkwardness. A Psychology Today blog notes that “sarcasm is a common tool of a passive aggressive person who expresses hostility aloud, but in socially acceptable, indirect ways.” It appears that I am an insecure, angry, socially awkward and passive aggressive . . . wingnut. I’m not happy with that portrait of Clement Gray. But still, it is difficult for me to constrain my sarcasm to my thoughts. It overflows the social dams and floods the plains of convention and human discourse.
My eldest daughter and my second bride know well my sarcastic bent. Lisa, my daughter, recently acknowledged inculcating my grandbeauties with the inevitability of sarcasm. My second bride has often told our children, “Your father is sarcastic.” For the most part, though, I have tried to wield sarcasm in a humorous way, a mirror to the face of farce. But I whipped out the weapon wrongly, once, against one of my bosses. She asked a question that I felt had an obvious answer, and I responded — in front of a gathering of her direct reports — with what I thought was a dry wit. It was, in truth, sarcastic, and she reached up from her 4’ 10” height to grab my 6’ 1” ear and dragged me to her office, where she gave me a well-deserved tongue-lashing. I crept from her office, chastised and chastened, and spent upwards of 20 minutes without setting free another dog of sarcasm.
I do make efforts to contain my sarcastic output. When someone lobs up a big, fat fungo, I wince, and grimace and go through a great grinding of teeth. As Jules said in the movie Pulp Fiction, “ . . . I’m tryin’ Ringo. I’m tryin’ real hard . . .” My friend called me recently — after I had spent 8 days at her house, keeping her dog alive while she sojourned in South Africa — and told me I had left food in her refrigerator. And please note this: I did NOT say to her, “Let me get back in my car, drive for one hour and 45 minutes to your house to collect 1/3 of a carton of orange juice, 6 cherry tomatoes, a bundle of celery hearts and one boiled egg.”
Wait: did the beast get out again?