Cosmic Irony
Idris Hsi, June 11, 2000
One of my favorite movies of all time, for no
rational reason, is The Great
Race (1965) starring Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Peter
Falk. Tony Curtis plays The Great Leslie, the Dashing Hero.
He's always dressed in white. He speaks 7 languages. He's a
consummate athlete. He's good looking. He does everything to
perfection. Worst of all, something which greatly irritates his nemesis
Professor Fate, played by Jack Lemmon, The Great Leslie's hair is always
immaculate. Towards the end of the movie, there's a terrific pie
fight. But the focus isn't so much on the pie fight as it is on Leslie,
blithely and elegantly weaving his way through the combatants and the flying
pastries with panache. When he finally does get a pie in the face
and hair due to a mistimed duck, the audience cheers because it's funny
to see someone that perfect get a pie in the face. That's comedy.
Irony is a special category of comedy.
It's situational humor that requires a peculiar chain of events that affects
someone or something in a poetically fitting fashion. Irony is usually
never funny to the victim but it's tremendously interesting to the bystanders.
For example, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone series were almost all about ironic
stuff. For example, there is an episode where a voracious bookworm
who complains about his inability to read in a noisy world filled with
irritating people is spared from a cataclysm while reading in a vault.
This catastrophe destroys all the people but leaves a lot intact, including
a library. Finally, he can read in peace and quiet but in an accident
loses his only means of reading - his glasses. Irony is lecturing
someone that they need to pay more attention to their surroundings then
turning around to be hit in the face by a pie because you weren't paying
attention. It's not very funny to you at the moment but it's hysterical
to the person you were lecturing.
Cosmic irony is irony where you get hit in
the face with a pie that has actually been thrown at you by something a
few miles away. You have pie on your face but you're not exactly
sure why. It's terribly funny to everyone involved but usually only
in retrospect. And it's not a seemingly intentional thing and fortunately
there's very little poetic justice involved. It's also the sort of
situational humor where the chain of events is also inherently funny and
not just the end result. It's cosmic and not simple irony
because if you consider it from the right angle (that someone on high is
out to get you), it actually is very funny.
I've been collecting these vignettes about Cosmic
Irony from personal experience. Over the years, I've had more than
a reasonably statistical amount of coincidence in my life. Some were
'opportunity meets preparation' kinds of coincidences. Some were
comical. Some were ironic. Most were cosmically ironic.
This has happened frequently enough that I've formed two theories of why
I've been so blessed with this rather annoying talent for attracting cosmic
irony.
My first thought is that everyone actually has this amount of cosmic
irony in their lives. God, The Universe, or Whoever Is In Charge
is this entity that has honed a divine talent for cosmic Rube Goldberg
machines whose sole purpose is to produce the chain reaction of events
in the world that have an ironic consequence. The problem has always
been the audience. Most humans don't pay very much attention to the
day to day events in their lives. This is a fairly ironic fact by
itself considering that given the relatively finite amount of time we live
that we'd be hyperaware of every single second. But we aren't.
So we tend to miss a lot of stuff. I've been blessed, or cursed,
with an above average memory, observational ability, and a keen sense of
the ironic. I remember details and make connections. While
I don't see every little marble rolling down a switchback or anvil-activated
seesaw, I see enough to tell me when something's Cosmically Funny or simply
Painful. Under this theory, I believe that if everyone paid attention
they'd notice that their lives were also cosmically ironic.
My second thought is more normal:
The Universe is simply out to get me.
I'm a strong proponent of this second thought. Just because you're
paranoid....
