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The High Priests of Snark
The New Yorker critic takes on smartasses who think they are being witty in an excerpt from his new book, Snark. Plus: A polite Q&A with David Denby.
A strain of nasty, knowing abuse is spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation—a tone of snarking insult provoked and encouraged by the new hybrid world of print, television, radio and the Internet. This is about style and also, I suppose, grace. Anyone who speaks of grace—so spiritual a word—in connection with our raucous culture risks sounding like a genteel idiot, so I had better say right away that I’m all in favor of nasty comedy, incessant profanity, trash talk, any kind of satire, and certain kinds of invective. It’s the bad kind of invective—low, teasing, snide, condescending, knowing; in brief, snark—that I hate…
I’m all in favor of nasty comedy, incessant profanity, trash talk, any kind of satire, and certain kinds of invective. It’s the bad kind of invective—low, teasing, snide, condescending, knowing; in brief, snark—that I hate.
It turns out in the wake of the Internet revolution, snark as a style has outgrown its original limited function. The Internet has allowed it to metastasize as a pop writing form: A snarky insult, embedded in a story or a post, quickly gets traffic; it gets linked to other blogs; and soon it has spread like a sneezy cold through the vast kindergarten of the Web. Not only that, it’s there forever, since it’s easily Googled out of obscurity. Along with all the useful, solid, clever, playful information and opinion circling around, a style of creepy nastiness is rampaging all over the place, too. The zombies are biting, and a hell of a lot of us are enjoying the spectacle. The Internet did not invent sarcasm, or the porous back fence where our gossiping parents gathered, or the tenderly merciful tabloids; but it provides universal distribution of what had earlier reached a limited number of eyes and ears. In brief, the knowing group has been enlarged to an enormous audience that enjoys cruelty as a blood sport.
FIVE IN DENBY’S SNARK HALL OF FAME
Lewis Carroll
As for the word snark, he later told a friend it was also pointless—nothing more than the combination of snail and shark. As Carroll used it, there was something sinister, hidden and destructive in the nonsense word from the beginning. The snark is the thing that makes you disappear.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Sarah Palin
There are snarky vice presidential campaigns (Sarah Palin’s mean-girl assault on Barack Obama as “someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists…”)
Ron Edmonds/AP
Maureen Dowd
She writes as if personality, appearance and attitude were the only things that mattered. For her, politics is a stupid, despair-inducing entertainment, a tale told by an idiot signifying vanity. Despite all her larks and inventions, she's essentially sour and without hope. In brief, she's the most gifted writer of snark in the country.
Bob Daemmrich Photography, Inc. /Corbis
Gore Vidal
The practice exists at different levels of ambition and skill, and at the top levels snark crosses into wit. In a 1976 essay….Gore Vidal, a master of high snark…achieves,…full snarky glory.
AP Photo
Gawker
This is the way snark journalism works now: The writers for Gawker or other gossip sites hear some accusation from a tipster or a sorehead, or read it in the newspaper, and then, after spicing the salad with dropwort, lay it out on the table, where it will remain forever. (The Internet does not clear away its dirty dishes.)
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times/Redux
From the book Snark, by David Denby (c) 2009. With permission from the publisher, Simon & Schuster.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
The Right Dumps Carrie
Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
Geithner's Stock Plummeting
Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.
Snark is the new impotence. Viagra doesn't touch it. Powerless people (I'm one!) in solitude say the things they'd love shout to if they could penetrate the security screens and locked doors protecting the high and mighty using us to gratify their egos, satisfy their lust for power or mock us for our beliefs. Or, it must be admitted, merely disagree..
I take issue with that Alaskan hillbilly so high on the roster. Snarkiness is synonymous with keen intellect and comedic timing. Palin is sarcastic and can mug for the camera in her sleep, but intelligent? Gore Vidal must be rolling over in his grave...
This book is a valuable, not to mention entertaining study.
I confess as a fellow snarkologist that my very favorite snark is the yacht built and used by Jack London, which he named for Lewis Carroll's poem.
There is a distinction to be made between perpetrators of fatuous snark on the one hand and sneak-attack, rapier-wit snark on the other.
With Sarah Palin fancying herself a pitbull but loosing the election, we've seen that her snark is worse than her bite.
My sentiments exactly, peacock - I'd have rethought my own definition of the word until I read that someone else found the inclusion of that idiot incongruous with the rest of the list. Come on, Denby, for Lewis Carroll's sake...
The mistake here is listing Sarah Palin along with the others. Sarah Palin is not a Snark (although Tina ey is, wonderfully.) Lewis Carrol, Maureen Dowd, Gore Vidal and the authors of Gawker (for the most part) are all brilliant writers and highly educated. Sarah Palin is a six-colleges-in-five-years dullard who managed t o get where she is using feral cunning and hateful religious bigotry. I can think of many five-letter words to describe her, "Snark" is not one of them. Let's leave snarkiness to the masters.
Why should anyone care what David Denby hates? Truly a man in love with his own preferences.
liviapeacock: Gore Vidal may be rolling over on his couch or in his bed or even on the floor but not likely in his grave as he's still alive.
Other than that, I agree. Palin does not belong in Vidal's company.
i think this is one of the many ways we're trying to figure out what this hair-trigger inner typing voice is that's habitual to record in blogs, and dark in it's tone. it comes from a different part of the brain than conversation or debate. maybe the french have been doing it better for centuries -- or is that too far-reaching a scope for the topic of the american blogger here and now?
i partly think after the fall of the u.s.s.r, its evil social space was occupied by free-world cheneys and cold-war agents and methods too good to let die.
I agree with your analysis but your examples are weak. And you compare Palin's remarks to Maureen Dowd and Gawker? That is quite a stretch. Palin is only snarky when the country projects on to her what they all think she's thinking or what they're thinking of her. It's little more than a fairy tale, as they say.
Palin, Dowd, and Gawker in, but not Will Rogers, George Carlin, and Mark Twain?
Of Rudyard Kipling, Twain wrote, "Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest." Possibly the best snark anyone has ever come up with.
Yeah, Denby's right. There's nothing worse than flame-broiling a smarmy, high-brow critic by undermining his antiquated sensibilities with the meat of a crass remark on top of the lettuce-bed of impeccable timing.
...
Oh, wait...
Denby has nailed Ms Dowd (metaphorically, of course). Her unhealthy obsession with the Clintons during the horrible Bush years shows her priorities. Her apologia pro vita for Caroline Kennedy yesterday in the Times shows she is still gaga over celebrity. I still read her columns because she is a clever writer but the once beautiful enfant terrible is becoming bitter and H.L Mencken-like. I compare the good Krugman, Herbert, Friedman, and Kristoff have done with their columns and think of her lost opportunities.
Denby seems to be the only arbiter of what constitutes "snark." We should know it when we see it, like obscenity. But using Denby's working definition: "a snarky insult, embedded in a story or a post, [which] quickly gets traffic" one could argue that including the rube Sarah Palin as a primary Snarker and in fact featuring her photograph as the main teaser of this story is, in and of itself, sort of snarky.
I mean, that's why I clicked on this story. I despise Sarah Palin and view her in the most condescending way possible. So my thoughts on Palin are inherently snarky.
I'm sorry to go all Derrida on Mr. Denby. His premise is pretty clever and I hope he sells a lot of books. And I don't mean that in a snarky way at all.
I know exactly what Denby means. Our national discourse has descended so badly just in the time that I first became interested in public affairs during the mid-1990s. Politicians, bloggers, members of the television and print media of all stripes, have often employed the most cynical manners to deliver their messages. Not only are they denigrating themselves with their insinuations and their automatic derision of their subjects and rivals, they're ruining public discussion for the rest of us. I suspect one of the main reasons these purveyors of snarkiness are so dismissive of figures who try to elevate public discussion is that to participate would be too difficult for the snarks and they don't want to be exposed as such diminutive figures.
I loved Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark" growing up, and such playful nonsense is a stark contrast to the sarcastic invective of bloggers and politicians:
"They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap."
I don't see much relation between this and modern snarkiness, though the Snark was rather sinister.
All you Palin bashers, I think you missed the point.
Listen to yourselves:
"I take issue with that Alaskan hillbilly so high on the roster. "
- liviapeacock
"I'd have rethought my own definition of the word until I read that someone else found the inclusion of that idiot incongruous with the rest of the list." - cook1974
"Sarah Palin is a six-colleges-in-five-years dullard who managed t o get where she is using feral cunning and hateful religious bigotry. I can think of many five-letter words to describe her, "Snark" is not one of them. Let's leave snarkiness to the masters." - thenicerguy
"Palin is only snarky when the country projects on to her what they all think she's thinking or what they're thinking of her."
- Mary50
"I despise Sarah Palin and view her in the most condescending way possible. So my thoughts on Palin are inherently snarky."
- Salome
"including the rube Sarah Palin" - Salome
You people are sick (and I don't mean in the good way).
Thank you.
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