A wife was bullied, back in school. Her husband told me that when they were dating he tried to be funny by using sarcasm. She made him stop. When he told me, I responded, “I despise sarcasm.”
I learned the word as a child watching A Charlie Brown Christmas. The dialogue went:
Charlie: Thanks for the Christmas card, Violet
Violet, passing him: I didn’t send you a Christmas card, Charlie Brown.
Charlie, calling: Don’t you know sarcasm when you hear it?
Maybe she knew, and maybe she didn’t. I wouldn’t have. At least, not until I saw that TV show.
There are individual ladies who will laugh at sarcasm, and individual men who try to make their girlfriends laugh, but I shudder to think of an entire social circle of adults being sarcastic. I live on the prairie, also known as the Bible Belt. On the porch after church if I use sarcasm on my friend Miriam then her face will cloud over until —or if— she “gets it” that I am lying. In the Doonesbury cartoons folks like Miriam and I are wide eyed, while folks who are like, say, the worldly Duke in Doonesbury , are drawn with lines shadowing their eyes. Duke is the sort who once said, “But the pension fund was just sitting there!”
The lines mean Duke is playing poker during everyday life, guarding his expression, filtering what he hears—for in case it is a lie or sarcasm—before he lets himself react. Like how a cautious radio studio uses a three second delay —the time it takes for a signal to reach the moon and back— during a live broadcast. Perhaps Duke grew up in a place where everyone lied, and so he thought he had to protect himself with a delay-filter. Not me. Call me a wide-eyed farm boy, but I refuse to live that way.
I am, besides living on the prairie, a reader of artistic fiction. It was novelist John Gardner, standing in front of a masterpiece painting, donated by the Chooser family, who observed the guy next to him quip, “Choosers can’t be beggars.” Gardner immediately knew the man was emotionally distant from the art: because one can’t make a pun if one is present in the moment. To delay-guard against sarcasm could mean being removed both from the present and from honest emotions, in both everyday life and around art. Not me, not my lifestyle choice. Perhaps my decision annoys people who live in New York City, as “sophisticates,” but so be it.
New York is the setting of the stage play Hair, which I was privileged to attend. The idealistic youth sang, in Age of Aquarius, “…no more falsehoods or derisions… mystic crystal revelations, and the mind’s true liberation…”
Liberation, like democracy, requires truth. Sarcasm, where one counts on the victim initially believing a lie, is not truth. Nor is most derision: as best I recall, the honest children weren’t bullies. The bullies not only lied to their victims, but to themselves. As a Nazi minister of propaganda said, if a lie is repeated, people believe it… “Stolen election,” anyone? That “belief” includes, ultimately, the minister of propaganda.
I think of that man’s poor wife, in her younger days. My Bible says that if you dare harm an innocent child you might as well have a millstone around your neck… Those who bullied, derided and tried to hoodwink her lied. How much did she believe? And doubt? Someone said that even after a victim reaches a seasoned adult-self-confidence, the capacity for self-doubt always remains.
Back to “falsehoods and derisions.” To put a hood over my own head, to blind myself to what I am falsely and abusively saying, is unworthy of me.
As for abuse, if I dare to be honest, then I have a quick and simple test to keep me from “abusing by mistake.” I simply “act as if” there is no middle ground—My words are ether nurturing or abusive.
I can imagine rehearsals for Hair. A stage director is nurturing when she yells at an actor, yelling not to be personal, not for derision, but for emphasis. Hence it is not appropriate for an actor to cringe down and say, “I”m sorry.”
Individuals may vary, of course, but as for Miriam and I, we are never nourished by sarcasm, never. I despise it.
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
Alberta
June
2025
Footnotes:
~For John Gardener, my memory is decades old. I may have the pun wrong, and it may have been a hypothetical of his, probably from one of his books on writing (Link)
~For “the capacity for self-doubt remains” today a teacher told me that her students may relapse into thinking, “I’m stupid,” like a tendency in a field to go onto a beaten path.
The quote comes from a man with something which required self confidence, a Ph.D., while his “beaten path,” like worn neurons, had been from having an abusive teacher in grade four.
In later years, because the US education system produced demoralized Black students lining the very back of college classes, he would go talk to them as a gentle fellow Black.
See his controversial essay collection The Content of Our Character subtitled A new vision of race in America by Shelby Steel. (Link)
~For more quotes of A Charlie Brown Christmas, a show we talked about the next day at school, see (Link)
