Irony and satire (1 Viewer)

A bit of rant here, feel free not to respond. I was in another corner of the internet and I saw a discussion that truly rang a bell with me, and it's how a lot of things right now on the internet and sometimes in art are presented as "ironic" and "satire." If they are not explicitly presented by the creators as one of those, then they are defended to death by their fans using those things as arguments as to why something is the best thing since the slice of bread.

Dry, joyless humor? Oh you wouldn't get it. It's ironic.

Awful personalities? It's great. They're just being cynical.

Bad taste, unthoughtful jokes/lyrics/whatever? Hey man, chill! It's satire!

Soulless work? It's supposed to be meta.

I don't have any clear examples right now and wouldn't like to generalize, but I don't know if anyone else has seen this phenomenon, especially on the internet. I once saw a video about David Foster Wallace where he talks about this, and he says it's all part of post-modernism or something like that. I wouldn't really blame it all on post-modernism. I like some post-modernism. It can be clever when it wants to and some creators (Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind) can pull this kind of thing off. Hell, I got into literature through Thomas Pynchon. But sometimes it just get's tiring. Sometimes it seems that "wink, wink, do you get it?" attitude replaces any kind of emotion and honesty that may show up in a work of art or criticism.
 

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