Let’s say, for the sake of example, that you donate your time once a week and work in a Retirement Home. Let’s also say that the old ladies in this facility are very nice, most of them are widowed, and they’re constantly telling you how handsome you are and how you remind them of when they were eighteeen, and, being a charismatic individual, you jokingly flirt back, saying things like “looking good, Mrs. S!” when 85-year-old Mrs. Strauss shows up to dinner in a polka dot dress. This is completely normal, acceptable behavior.
This situation instantly becomes unacceptable, however, when you parlay your flirtation into ACTUALLY F***ING THE OLD LADIES.
This brings me to my point about Sunday night’s Tay Zonday concert at Europa in Brooklyn. It’s fine to watch a viral video and laugh at it and email it to your friends, then watch the parodies of that viral video, then chuckle at the person in the video awkwardly performing to silence on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” It stops being ironically amusing, however, when you pay actual money to actually go and see that individual in person actually attempting to play actual music for actual crowds. At this point, you’re no longer flirting; you’re f***ing the old ladies. Make sense?
Trust me — and this is coming from the a-hole whose first piece of business when I visited Seattle was to purchase and wear a “Frasier” T-shirt — nothing can destroy ironic enjoyment faster than a large group of people effortly seeking it out.
As another example, my roommate and I very fortunately came across a commercial for tax consolidation featuring Corbin Bernsen that would have looked like an awful, low-budget ad if it hadn’t kept cutting back to Roger Dorn’s unmistakable testimony, and we’ve been replaying it about daily on our DVRs for anyone who ends up at our apartment (or just for ourselves). However, if Corbin Bernsen goes ahead and embraces this goofy advertisement, and writes and stars in a 2-hour feature film about tax debt with a self-aware viral marketing campaign and a bunch of tv interviews promoting how wonderfully bad the movie is, it’s not like I’m gonna — well, I would go and see it, actually. I would definitely go and see it. I’d be there for the midnight Thursday show. So, bad example.
I guess what my argument really boils down to is, who in their ungodly, irony-charred remainder of a skull would ever want to actually go and see Tay Zonday performing songs in concert? Even when I found the “Chocolate Rain” video hilarious, which we all did, I couldn’t sit through more than three minutes of it. Could you imagine that plus other songs, in a place where you can’t fast forward, surrounded by hipsters who are really demonstratively pretending to have fun any time Tay does something lame? At what point does the pursuit of irony just turn into willfully subjecting oneself to non-enjoyment?
The answer is, when this happens:
(thanks to this dude for attending the event and taking photos, so we didn’t have to)
