Lea Michele returns as Rachel Berry, Glee's show-choir diva.

“There’s nothing ironic about show choir!”

That would be Rachel Berry, aka the lead diva of Fox’s Glee. Back when she made this grand proclamation it was a joke.

Upset that the lead in the song “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” had, yes ironically, been given to a boy in a wheelchair, the line was supposed to be the zinger with which she stormed out of glee practice. It was.

But this was Glee’s 2009 pilot episode, so the line also set two precedents for the show: 1) Rachel will be a master at the art of storm-outs, and 2) Glee isn’t for those that go for smarter-than-thou, knee-jerk quips — it’s for people who actually like singing, dancing, heartfelt moments and rooting for little guys.

Irony is out; sincerity is in. There, I said it.

Considering that Glee, which returns to Fox on Tuesday night at 8 p.m. Easter/9 p.m. Pacific for a second season, has been such a massive success that it’s already guaranteed two more seasons, it’s not unlikely that this is just the beginning.

The shift has already started: A pop star like Lady Gaga can be heard unapologetically blaring from hipster dive bars. And at this point no one can claim the roughly $300 million The Twilight Saga: Eclipse made this summer all came from teenagers who don’t know any better. It won’t be a bunch of kids who flock to the upcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, either.

Guilty pleasures have become just pleasures. President Barack Obama was elected in a wave of hope, no small feat in a country as cynical about politics and politicians as they are (or were) about the prospects of The Bachelor choosing his life-long soul mate on national TV. It seems a generation of ironists is finally running out of steam.

But why? There are probably a lot of reasons, but the easiest thing to do, as always, is to blame the geeks. A decade ago — before Seth Rogen was sexy, before Spider-Man was bankable and before Hollywood went to Comic-Con International — you had to be smarter than your music, movies and TV shows. You had to have a sarcastic quip to make about everything.

Then the nerds came in and, contrary to what some might think, brought with them unabashed love for anything anyone might want to geek out over. And all are welcome.

“There was this very strong sense in the ’90s of irony, of everyone being in the theater and being really ironically funny, and that they were smarter than the movie…. It just seems played out to me,” says Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, a film professor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Ficks teaches classes on underrated and under-appreciated films and hosts midnight movies in the city’s Castro Theatre. He’s dedicated his film series to letting patrons appreciate films like A League of Their Own and Big Trouble In Little China in “a neo-sincere way.”

“You used to have to protect yourself from geeking out — that’s why we have this idea of guilty pleasures,” Ficks says, adding that calling something a “guilty pleasure” or saying “I only like it ironically” was a way to avoid ridicule.

Irony was supposed to have died out once the 1990s were over. Following the Sept. 11 terror attacks, there was a brief period during which the detached, sarcastic smartass stance just didn’t seem appropriate.

“I think it’s the end of the age of irony,” Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter was quoted as saying. The new rallying cry was for a New Sincerity. On Salon.com, David Beers argued that it wasn’t an end to irony that was needed but a new form of “engaged irony.”

Regardless, irony continued in whatever form, but not without the seeds of sincerity being planted.

Isn’t It Moronic?

This, however, doesn’t mean irony is magically going to disappear from your radios, multiplexes or flat screens (sleep tight, Jon Stewart). It just means it’s increasingly becoming less and less popular for critiques to be framed in the smart-alecky tone of someone dead-set on proving they’re smarter than Dancing With the Stars.

Looking for irony in everything makes the ironist see nothing at face value. If you’re looking for an Alanis Morrissette joke here, you won’t find one. “Ironic” the song actually fueled ironists for years, giving them something to snark about and feel superior to (isn’t that ironic?).

Neo-sincerity is a move away this brand of irony — a mindset that can just say, “Well it was a catchy song” and move on. Think of it this way: The joke in Reality Bites is supposed to be that bright valedictorian Lelaina (played by Winona Ryder) can’t define “irony” but slacker Troy (Ethan Hawke) can.

It’s supposed to be funny that any member of Generation Irony can’t define it. As a viewer you get that joke, you’re smarter than the film. Congratulations. But in making that quip, the film laid out the differences between ironists and neo-sincerists quite well — Troy is the epitome of cigarette-smoking, detached judgment (the fellow of infinite jest that Ben Stiller’s Michael calls him out to be). Lelaina is the painfully earnest one who wouldn’t blanch at saying, “Melrose Place is a really good show.” (Message: There is hope that members of both camps can still end up in bed together.)

Turn On, Tune In

It’s possible we were trained in irony by the very instrument that is usually the target of its ridicule: TV.

David Foster Wallace was way ahead of this curve, understanding that by the 1980s almost all of television had become painfully ironic because it was a way to alleviate the tension between TV’s not-too-subtle message of Look at all these beautiful people enjoying themselves and the viewer’s status (typically) as lone, and perhaps lonely, observer. Making the viewer feel like he or she is smarter than the entertainment they’re consuming then becomes the entertainment.

“Not only are sincerity and passion now ‘out,’ TV-wise, but the very idea of pleasure has been undercut,” Wallace wrote in his essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (.pdf) for the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993. He went on to note that “TV can flatter [us] about ’seeing through’ the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in [us] precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught [us] to crave…. Further viewing begins to seem almost like required research, lessons in the blank, bored, too-wise expression that [we] must learn how to wear.”

Wallace concluded the essay by suggesting that the next rebels could be “born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching,” who risk being labeled as too sincere or melodramatic. He was specifically speaking of the future of literary writing, but his lessons could easily translate to almost any art.

A lot has happened since Wallace looked in his cultural crystal ball. We have, for example, seen films like Scream, which sought to sardonically poke fun at the juvenile grotesqueness of horror films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, actually bring about a renaissance in over-the-top slasher flicks like the Saw films. (It should come as no surprise that Ficks’ film series recently featured Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body at a late-night screening, where it was more warmly received by the Castro audience than it was by critics.)

That Shit Was Crazy

University of Glasgow sociology professor Harvie Ferguson argued in 1999 that irony emerged as a form of negative communication to permit our private selves and public selves to coexist by “allowing the authenticity of the inner self to be expressed indirectly by affirming its opposite.” To put it another way, if you want to appear cool and smart, just rag on an easy target like Saved By the Bell by saying that you love it for how stupid it is. You’ll never have to reveal how you truly feel about anything because ironic detachment will protect you from accidentally revealing a like for something un-hip.

Ficks worries that this has become so rampant it’s made it nearly impossible for many of us to honestly know how we feel about anything, so we merely say things are “crazy” or “ridiculous” — vague critiques that can be perceived as either positive or negative — so we don’t get busted giving the wrong opinion in mixed company.

Ferguson speculated that the age of irony might actually end up replaced by an age of glamour, which was a “non-ironic non-identity” that allowed the self to “[abandon] itself to appearance.”

In pop music this is certainly true. Because while there has always been an aspect of glamour to pop music, the level at which it has been consciously performed has changed, and so has the level of acceptance that kind of gloss receives from those who would normally fall into the category of Ironists.

So Happy We Could Die

In the span of the last decade we’ve gone from only being willing to (publicly, at least) enjoy Britney Spears as a “guilty pleasure” to consciously liking Justin Timberlake (Pitchfork gave FutureSex/LoveSounds an 8.1) to exalting Lady Gaga as the savior of music (or, at least some of us have).

This seems fair. Gaga, with all her fame-as-high-art bravado, has lost herself in glamour in Ferguson’s sense of the word. By becoming nothing but persona, she has erased irony from the equation. Or, perhaps more realistically, Lady Gaga has just absorbed the irony into her persona. In 2006, Jesse Thom, host of the Sound of Young America radio show, wrote in his “Manifesto for The New Sincerity” that this new movement could be thought of “as irony and sincerity combined like Voltron, to form a new movement of astonishing power.” Gaga in a nutshell.

It should be noted that neo-sincerity doesn’t mean having to enjoy total shit. Earlier this year, Sean O’Neal wrote on the Onion’s Austin A.V. Club blog that he was, essentially, over the ironic appreciation of Saved By the Bell because it was “a truly terrible show.” Some would call for an end to ironic appreciation of junk culture that is, actually, junk. And while neo-sincerity certainly has room for people to be earnest about what they dislike, the greater good is serviced by creating a space for people to enjoy what they genuinely enjoy.

There is, however, another aspect of irony that O’Neal points to that has nothing to with either liking or disliking the objects of our ironic appreciation: nostalgia.

It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday

In her essay “Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern,” Linda Hutcheon outlined the numerous ways irony was tied to nostalgia, noting that while irony owned the 1980s, the 1990s brought in an era of nostalgia, which she at least partially credited to “dissatisfaction with the culture of the present.” This could explain why so often the things ironists feel they can’t embrace earnestly (Journey, karaoke, Gilmore Girls) harken back to a previous time in their lives and, most likely, weren’t appreciated by the ironists in any honest form in their actual heyday.

Why call your enjoyment of the early works of NSync ironic when you could just say, “I didn’t give this stuff a fair chance when it came out because I thought I was too cool, my bad”?

A show like Glee actually succeeds on two levels. It clearly hits more than a few nostalgia buttons. It’s also probably not lost on most viewers that the kids in the New Directions show choir weren’t speaking or even alive — let alone singing — when many of the songs they’re performing were actually hits. Yet Glee’s songs are an element in popular culture that can be appreciated right now. No distance necessary.

In her essay, Hutcheon points out that Immanuel Kant claimed people who returned to their childhood homes were typically disappointed because they didn’t want to return to a place but to a time — a time when they were young. This nostalgia is all over Glee in both the narrative (see: glee club teacher Will Schuester’s desire to live out his missed dreams through the kids he teaches in, like, every episode) and in its audience (many of whom are former glee clubbers and theater geeks missing their high school glories).

This makes it nearly impossible to have ironic appreciation of Glee because it’s too busy celebrating all the things ironists would deride because they don’t want to admit nostalgia for them. Even the captains of snark at Gawker/Defamer have caved on Glee.

Revenge of the Nerds

So what shall come in irony’s place? For Ficks (and others before him), it’s a straight shot to a neo-sincere future. Based on the initial observations Wallace made, this would appear to be the safe bet. (In the new collection of Wallace essays, Consider David Foster Wallace, released last month, Adam Kelly discusses the author’s position at the forefront of the new sincerity movement, so it’s possible this discussion has only just begun.)

But there’s one other thing to consider. In Adam Sternberg’s recent essay for New York magazine, he notes that while “the fanboys win,” there was the possibility that their rise could result in a non-fanboy being forced to sit “alone in his garage, wondering if it’s safe to tell anyone that he’s not particularly psyched for a Kick-Ass sequel and that he fell asleep in Inception halfway through.”

In other words, the revenge of the nerds only leads to the tyranny of the geeks.

Overthrowing the ironists may lead to a dictatorship of neo-sincerists. However, in this new Age of Sincerity, there is hope that we can be sincere about the things we love and hate.

Love show choir? Fine. Hate comic books? It’s a free country.

If irony has taught us anything, it’s that nothing exists in a vacuum safe from mockery. But if geeking out has taught us anything, it’s that there are 101 ways to be a nerd. It’s time we embraced all of them.

See Also:

• We're All Gleeks — 10 Questions With Glee Co-Creator Brad Falchuk
• Thanks a Lot: Pop Culture's Finest Moments of 2009

Authors: Angela Watercutter

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