Irony

It is the very essence of the professor's lecture style, certainly mine, in any case, so fearful was I that what I was saying was not being given the proper skepticism from my audience, since I, long before post modernist criticism was fully aware that the material I was offering for all the assurance of my years of study was in the end just so much opinion.  Mocking yourself while talking can be very off putting to those in your hearing since they are thus put off balance and don't know what to believe.  It is very unfair, but nonetheless, the very essence, as I say, not just of my delivery but of a great many people in the humanities.  It's just that no one is really sure that any of this is true.  I was made very conscious of my tendency to irony recently while traveling with some friends one of whom has the mental habit of an extremely literal mind.  So that when I would highlight the ironic stance by exaggerating in what I thought was an entirely obvious way some "truth" or another, she would respond anxiously inquiring as to the validity of so monstrous a misstatement rather than recognizing what I was doing at the outset, ah, poor lady.  It seems to me that gay persons have an especially ironic manner, that this is a tradition deriving from the years when gays were mostly in hiding and therefore everything they said on some level was a lie, and hence the motive to contrive to render truths ironically.  I have also often argued that gay males' incapacity to reproduce from the act of homosexual intercourse, undermines the orgasm, which at some level ought always to be understood as a biological act, and makes gay lovemaking however, emotionally and physically sincere, meaningful and rewarding, is on the teleologically biological level ironic.  The fact of the matter is that the ironic manner can end up being endlessly boring.  Think of George Sanders in "The Picture of Dorian Grey," or practically in every other film he was ever in.  The very master of the ironic stance.