ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Whatever else the remarks indicate about Corbyn's character, they certainly reveal that he adheres to a widespread English fetishization of irony. The English investment in irony can hardly be overstated, which is why suggesting that an individual, or a community, might be incapable of appreciating it is especially damning. Irony is to the English what self-reliance is to Americans, or what linguistic cultivation is to the French: a core value often elevated to the status of myth. One might say that the English take pride in their sense of irony, though pride is not quite the right word for the national commitment to a mode of discourse that depends so entirely upon understatement. The belief that English irony, or the English sense of humor more broadly, amounts to an intangible national treasure is widespread. It is common to the point of cliché for English expats to list the national sense of humor among those aspects of life they most miss, along with Radio 4 and a decent cup of tea.

What, then, characterizes English irony? In one sense, it is the habit of saying one thing when meaning its opposite. But English irony does not merely depend upon reversal for its effect; it also depends heavily upon deflation, of oneself or of others. English irony, when effectively deployed, is what English pomposity looks like after being pricked with a pin. It was a triumph of English irony when, a couple of years ago, the National Environmental Research Council invited members of the public to name a twenty-million-pound polar-exploration ship, and the overwhelming winner was "Boaty McBoatface." (Officials rejected the name in favor of the R.R.S. Sir David Attenborough, named for the naturalist and broadcaster.) Similarly, the personal ads in the London Review of Books turn irony into a minor art form, with would-be romantic partners competing with ever more outlandish displays of self-deprecation, describing themselves as "Sinister-looking man with a face that only a mother would love," or "Woman, 24, inherited her mother's unreasonable and utterly unfounded nostalgia (and her father's hirsute back)."

In the London Review of Books personals, the wounding quality that is so often present in English irony is turned inward, to the point that self-loathing is so acute it becomes a form of self-love. (I may be ugly, but look how clever I am.) Often, though, the violence of irony is turned outward. The British playwright David Hare, in the notes to his play "Plenty," writes that, when foreign actors ask him why a character behaves in a certain way, he believes it is sufficient to reply, "Because you are English." Hare goes on, "Irony is central to English humor, and as a people we are cruel to each other, but quietly." In this sense, Corbyn's charge that some people "don't understand English irony" participates in a ratcheting up of cruelty in the name of humor. The next step beyond hurting an individual or a group with a joke at their expense is to insist that their pain, far from being a justified response to verbal violence, is a symptom of deficiency on their part. The charge that a person lacks a sense of humor is a familiar bully's tactic. Women in particular will recognize that the phrase "Can't you take a joke?" is an expression of menace, not an invitation to share a laugh.

Above all else, the English valorization of irony participates in the English aversion to anything approaching earnestness. For a newspaper reviewer, for example, to describe the work of an author as painfully or overly earnest is to deliver a critique as withering as it is ineluctable: the author who has actually committed the transgression of earnestness is unable to dismiss the accusation with an ironical shrug. Irony requires a scrupulously refined emotional detachment. It is what the English have instead of therapy. (Irony's counterpart, in the English context, is sentimentality, and, given enough drinks, any Englishman will morph from acidulous detachment to maudlin deliquescence.) To be able to maintain an ironical approach to life means avoiding a more passionately committed or passionately expressive one. It means arming oneself in advance against the possibility of pain or disappointment, by building pain and disappointment into one's emotional default. Irony is resignation in jester's clothing.

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