Translator: Daniel Moore Reviewer: Claire Ghyselen
I wanted to start by saying,
"What a tremendous honor and a genuine pleasure it is
to be speaking with you today."
A tremendous honor and a genuine pleasure, or, to put it another way,
a tremendous honor and genuine pleasure.
If you haven't worked it out by now, I'm going to speak to you about sarcasm.
You may have noticed - well in fact, you've been explicitly told I'm English.
This used to be a nationality, now it's more of an apology,
Throughout history, there are many things
that have been identified as the English disease:
the skin disease scrofula,
homosexuality during the 19th century,
and more recently, football hooliganism.
Well, the good news is scrofula is now easily treatable,
homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of
and football hooliganism even has been transformed
into a political movement called Brexit.
(Laughter)
But the real English disease in my opinion is sarcasm.
It's our less exotic version of malaria.
When I moved to Latvia ten years ago, I really hoped that I could escape
the old-encompassing fog of English sarcasm,
but to my dismay, it seems to me
that I've acted as some sort of carrier for this disease,
and that Latvians are becoming more and more sarcastic.
So in talking about it today, I'm hoping really to inoculate you
against this pernicious disease, if you've still got a chance.
This all came to a head not long ago
when I was reading a review someone had written
of one of my really excellent books,
which was, on the whole, quite a positive review.
But at the end, it was in an online review.
There was a comment section where someone had written,
"Yeah, but what sort of thing does he write?"
And the answer really dismayed me, the answer was: "He writes sarcasm."
I was very, very worried about this
because I was convinced that I wasn't writing sarcasm,
but I decide to have a look at my writing and my speech,
and see if I really was sarcastic.
So, at this point in a presentation,
it's traditional either to do some clicked stuff,
but the good news is: I can't do powerpoint, so I've only got two slides,
or to read a dictionary definition of the subject that we're talking about.
I'm a traditionalist so I'm going to read out the dictionary definition.
Looking at dictionary definitions of sarcasm,
you immediately hit one of the problems
which is that people give it fare more credit than it really deserves.
They talk about things like satire, irony, wit.
It's my contention that sarcasm it's not satirical.
It's not witty and it's not particularly ironic.
It's something a lot cruder, simpler and less likeable than that,
but let's turn to one of the typical dictionary definitions,
which is one of the better ones, actually.
"Sarcasm:" The use of remarks that clearly mean the opposite of what they say,
made it in order to hurt someone's feelings,
or to criticize something in a humorous way.
Well, even that is a little bit strange: it's something which is hurtful,
but which is also humorous.
I think we need a better definition of sarcasm.
There is very little academic literature being produced about sarcasm.
The best thing I could find is a book published in 1998
by an academic called John Haiman.
It's called "Talk is Cheap."
Haiman considers all sorts of varieties of insincere language,
these things like euphemism, understatement, overstatement,
banter, politeness, prayers.
Even just asking someone "How are you" in a sense is insincere language;
we're not really interested in their health,
we're just getting the social interaction going.
But Haiman has what I think is a pretty good definition of sarcasm:
"Sarcasm is a particularly transparent variety of cheap talk or hot air,
insofar as the speaker is overtly meaning and saying the opposite
of what he or she claims to be saying."
So it's a game of opposites - black equals white, good equals bad-
but it's also avoidance of meaning:
you're saying something supposedly the opposite of your meaning,
but you're also denying your meaning at the same time.
This is what puts sarcasm in a category of its own,
compared to other forms of insincere language:
it denies its own content.
The sarcast, which is the technical term -
but I prefer "sarcasist" because it sounds a little bit funnier-
they only say what they do not believe,
and this, in my opinion, cannot be a healthy state of affairs.
The first thing we need to clear up is the difference between sarcasm and irony.
Irony I think can reach into quite rich and paradoxical areas of human expression.
It can reach into self-deprecation, into all sorts of areas of the absurd
which sarcasm with its "black equals white, good equals bad," simply does not.
Haiman has a very good sort of rubric here that we can use
for identifying whether something is sarcastic or ironic.
So situations can be ironic, but only people can be sarcastic.
So let's take an example, you might say, "This guy on the stage is cleverer
than the Riga born philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin."
You'd probably say it sarcastically in order to hurt my feelings,
so that's sarcasm.
For irony, I could say,
"Ironically, a year ago I was sitting exactly where you're sitting now,
on Sir Isaiah Berlin Day, watching a film about Sir Isaiah Berlin,
which made me realize how much cleverer he was than me.
So, sarcasm is present tense only.
Irony refers to some previous event, or previous established fact.
Therefore, I would claim that irony is cleverer than sarcasm
just as Isaiah Berlin is cleverer than me.
One quotation that everyone in the English speaking world knows by sarcasm is:
"sarcasm is the lowest form of wit",
and who said it?
Allegedly Oscar Wilde,
the man responsible for saying 99% of all witty things ever,
if you believe some people,
and also, I think the man largely responsible for the identification
of sarcasm with wit, which I think is unwarranted.
A lot of people know that quotation,
but very few people know the second half of the quotation, which is:
"Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence."
There are a few variations on that.
It's one of these things that's attributed to Wilde
but no one seems to know when or where he said it,
but we won't argue the point at the moment.
The trouble with that statement is,
on one hand, he's probably being sarcastic,
in which case it kind of negates it.
It sounds great; again we have highest and lowest:
lowest form of wit, highest form of intelligence.
But, when you think about it, it's a real genuine statement of belief.
It's meaningless.
Wilde I think has a bit of form when it comes to the use of sarcasm
to sound clever: just look at some of the titles of some of his plays.
You've got: "Women of no importance," about a woman who's quite important,
"An ideal husband", about a husband who is far from ideal,
and his best-known play,
which at least I'm going to use in this presentation:
"The Importance of being Earnest," his most famous play.
The trouble of course is ...
that he was probably sarcastic when he said it and I'm not.
I do think it's important to be earnest.
Now, we know what sarcasm is, and we need to know how to spot it.
As we've already said, it relies upon the listener to qualify as sarcastic.
So if I'm being sarcastic and you don't realize I'm being sarcastic,
I'm not really being sarcastic, I've been a poor communicator,
just like I'm being right now.
So, there are two basic forms of identifying sarcasm.
They are linguistic and demonstrative terms.
So linguistic would be simply placing emphasis,
or placing what's call a tag at the beginning
or the end of an otherwise quite obvious statement.
So: "I care about that."
You could do the Waynes's World approach:
"I care about that, not?"
You could switch the tag to the front:
"I suppose I care about that."
Or you can put it on the front and the back,
in which case the meaning becomes really confused:
"Not that I care about that, or anything."
So basically any marker which draws attention to the words spoken
rather than the actual meaning of the words,
will tend to be interpreted sarcastically.
And that's why we find quotation marks, when they are inappropriately used.
There are another tag so amusing, so: "I 'care' about that,"
or: "'Welcome' to Latvia, we hope you have a 'great' holiday."
(Laughter)
The other type of tag, which is commonly used would be the demonstrative tag,
or hopefully a demonstrative tag,
like rolling your eyeballs, winking, so: "I care about that."
(Laughter)
"I care about that."
It's like the Monty Python nudge-nudge wink-wink say-no-more annoying character.
He's intensely sarcastic and intensely annoying.
Now, let's take another example
and explore this symphony of sarcasm that is at our fingertips.
We'll take another simple statement:
"What a great lecture this is."
"What's a great lecture this is."
"What a great lecture this is."
So as you can see we can place the emphasis on pretty much any word,
and we get the sarcastic effect.
At least "is" is sarcasm proof, right? or "is it?"
(Laughter)
I'm hamming it up a bit in my delivery but you get the idea.
And I realize this is quite a lot to take in at one go,
so I've ridden to the rescue and I've come up with a formula,
an equation of sarcasm.
Newton had his laws of motion.
Einstein had his beautiful theory of relativity.
And now in a world first here in Riga TEDx's,
you're going to able to tell your grandchildren
that you were here, at the revealing
of Colliers' first law of sarcasm.
It's quite simple:
S equals P divided by I consists of L plus or minus D,
where S is sarcasm, P is the preposition in the negative,
I is the indicator, consisting of L, linguistic, or D, demonstrative particles,
or both, it's quite simple, right?
There's even an easier way to remember it:
"SPILD."
"Spilled."
I'm quite proud of that and I'll be getting some T-shirts printed,
which will be available in the foyer after the lecture.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Thank you, it took a long time.
So why am I anti-sarcasm?
Because we Brits are supposed to love sarcasm, right?
Well, partly because it's usually quite obvious and boring,
and partly because it's very addictive.
When I look at my writing after the comment that I saw earlier on,
I saw that to my relief, it wasn't particularly sarcastic, I would say.
It's was highly ironic but not sarcastic.
But my conversation, definitely was too sarcastic for comfort.
Sometimes, Latvian friends tell me that I'm sarcastic,
and they mean it as a compliment.
I smile and go along with it.
But the problem is that sarcasm is essentially a form of lying.
It's a form of saying what you don't mean.
If you replace the word "sarcasm" with the word "lying,"
and make the same sort of statements, you get some unusual results.
So, for instance: "That's good old British lying!"
"He is so funny when he lies!"
"How I would described his character in a single word? Liar."
(Laughter)
So you can see where my problem is, where I'm coming from on this.
The biggest problem with the extended use of sarcasm
is that, after a while, you stop noticing that you're being sarcastic.
It gets even worse because if you do want to say something sincerely,
people won't believe you when you object to it.
So: "I do believe that honestly,"
and everyone will laugh and say, "Look, he's been sarcastic again."
So, if you've caught a dose of this malarial sarcasm from me,
how do we treat it?
Well, I've got four quick suggestions.
The first would be sincerity, simply saying what you mean.
But this is quite problematic.
It's kind of the equivalent of making a drug addict do cold turkey,
or hiding the bottles from an alcoholic.
May be it's a bit too hardcore to go into straightaway.
A second approach would be citation.
If you are not sure of your own opinion, just use someone else's,
by which I mean quote poetry, scientists, investigators, whatever.
You'll probably find your own opinion and belief about something
forming quite naturally as a result.
A third alternative is imagination: just embrace the absurd.
You don't have to provide a boring answer to a boring question.
You stand on your head, freak out, anything,
rather than the tired trick of sarcasm.
And finally, something that I'd love to see come back.
it's the 18th century dramatic technique of the aside,
where you'd have two actors speaking on stage, having a conversation,
and they'd be turning to the audience and say what they truly feel.
For instance, I might say to you,
"What do you think of my new book?" and you would reply:
"It's like nothing I've ever read, because I haven't read it."
(Laughter)
So is sarcasm always bad?
Well, not always, but it needs to be treated with caution.
In Japanese culture,
there's a mode of speech called "rua kuka" -nothing to do with cakes-
which is used by young lovers when they're first getting to know each other,
and they give each other sort of mild insults
to avoid the embarrassment of genuine feelings of affection.
but this is like a well-tended little bonsai garden,
compared to the vast, bleak moorland of English sarcasm.
As far as writers are concerned, there are very few who I think
are able to deploy sarcasm in an effective way.
But one of them is one of my heroes, Jonathan Swift.
Incidentally, he was also the literary hero of George Orwell,
not that I'm trying to make you think Swift, Orwell, Collier,
that's the last thing on my mind.
Now, I'll give you an example of full strength uncut Swiftian sarcasm,
from a poem written in 1730, with the very sarcastic title:
"An excellent new ballad."
For anyone who thinks that Jonathan Swift is a children's writer,
and that "Gulliver's Travels" is a children's tale,
you're in for a bit of a shock I'm afraid.
Just absorb these six lines of absolutely dripping sarcasm,
well, five lines of sarcasm which set up the last line, which is not sarcastic,
and has a real kick as a result.
So, "An excellent new ballad:"
"Our brethren of England who love us so dear,
and in all they do for us so kindly do mean -
a blessing upon them - have sent us this year,
for the good of our church, a true English dean.
A holier priest never was wrapped up in crepe.
The worst you can say, he committed a rape."
It's a swinging indictment of a church, which is moving a sex offending priest,
Well, how do you react to something like this?
You could write like Swift; you could make a film like Spotlights;
or, as I would recommend,
you say what you really mean and what you condemn.
So in conclusion, just say yes to sarcasm,
by which I mean, no.
(Laughter)
It was a pleasure and an honor speaking with you today.
Thank you.
(Applause)