1996 saw the American release of the movie which inspired the addition of a Foreign Film category to the Meredith Awards – my vaguely annual way of honoring the most philosophically integrated film of the year. That film was Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule, the tale of a rural French nobleman, Ponceludon, who has to play the game of intrigue at the court of Louis XVI if he wants to persuade the king to finance an engineering project which will dramatically improve the economy and living conditions in the area he governs. At Louis' court, however, the key to winning royal favour is wit – defined by writers Rémi Waterhouse, Michel Fessler and Eric Vicaut as the ability to out-clever everyone around you. It's a seductive little game; there is genuine fun in watching people come up with just the right barb at just the right time to be noticed, favourably, by everyone around. But it’s also a vicious little game, and worse, an all-consuming one. Forget the utility of any particular expense; forget rewarding the intelligent and diligent. Cleverness became the coin of the realm, a value unto itself, and the aristocracy happily partied its way straight into the French Revolution.

And it's the same sort of "That's the line of the evening, folks" gadaboutry which Jedediah Purdy bemoans. He laments, in essays like "Age of Irony," "the oft-reported impression that today's youthful conversation is an amalgam of pop-culture references, snatches of old song lyrics, and bursts of laughter at what would otherwise seem the most solemn moments." I don’t entirely disagree with him. But I think there’s a point he's missing. Here's why.

One of the hallmarks of postmodern literature -– or its broader sense, discourse -– is a tendency toward textual referentialism. It's academically cool to collect bits and scraps from everything from Milton, John to Milton Berle, then piece them into a patchwork-quilt of commentary which reflects on its sources as much as its subject. An essay on Hemingway is no longer just an essay on Hemingway; it's also an essay on everyone whose work on Hemingway, or contemporary with Hemingway, or in some sense semantically related to Hemingway, the author has chosen to work into the text. This is not news. Citing one's sources is important for purposes of academic honesty; it is also possible to create insight into a situation by demonstrating factors which have influenced the situation, e.g. the role of the House of Stuart in the gross historical inaccuracies which Shakespeare perpetuated in Macbeth. But somewhere in every piece of writing, there is an invisible-but-palpable line marked TOO MUCH. Too much outside material, too little original commentary. Too many references, too little contemplation of what bearing they have on the text. Bloom's Taxonomy places knowledge at the base of the intellectual pyramid -– it's a fundamental foundation, but simply collecting knowledge doesn't get you up to the heights of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Making knowledge-based connexions is simple: "X looks like Y, therefore I can make a remark about Y that is similar to the remark I made about X." (Thus the popularity of comparison-based jokes: when, as Purdy referenced, the media gets a chance to hammer on a phrase like "I feel your pain," suddenly every similar expression looks like a nail.) But does it tell us anything new?

No, not really. And ultimately, these sorts of jokes fall flatter and flatter, until some clever or lucky sort stumbles across the Next Big Joke, which finds itself repeated by sincere flatterers until it, too, dies a merciful death.

And this is the same problem that good Ponceludon faces in Ridicule: the focus is on the style and not the substance. Dressing up an old joke in new clothes can elicit all new laughs -– just look at the enduring popularity of lightbulb jokes, or the infinite philosophical/political variations on "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Meanwhile, good ideas go untapped because everyone's looking to make the knowledge-level connexion.

Irony is not the enemy here, folks. Lack of originality is.

And I suspect that on some level, Purdy realises this: he praises Twain and Swift, and I suspect he doesn't have too many complaints about Voltaire. He has plenty of good words for writers who we remember today because they broke ground: Michel de Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin. They were not merely "friends of decency, enemies of cruelty and irresponsible power"; they were founts of stuff that no one had seen before. And they did it funny. In Randian terms, they used irony as a virtue, a weapon in the arsenals they used to win the value of Writing Something Really Good.

And I'll argue that there are big chunks of today's society that have elevated irony to the level of a value: that it's become an end, not a means. "Indeed, irony tends to discourage civic involvement of all sorts," writes Purdy. Well, sure: if your goal is the pursuit of irony, then by default, civic involvement is not your goal. Irony for irony's sake is fleeting, forgettable, particularly in a world of words where any one human can only remember so much stuff at any given time. Think of the quotes which stick in your mind and don't go away, and I suspect you'll find that the ones which stand out are solid substance, lovingly wrapped in a catchy and memorable style. In geek terms, they are elegant solutions: they do something useful in a particularly slick and brilliant fashion. Without the elegance, they're kludges: workaday or one-off answers which get the job done, but do so sluggishly or just well enough to get by. Without the solution, they're just fluff: "it's pretty, but what good is it?"

(Geeks know this because one of the tests of true geekhood is whether you can get stuff done. Talk all the big sticks you like, but if you can't write the whitepaper, crank out the lines of code, instruct the class to the class's satisfaction, sell the story, draw the comic, reassemble the M-16, whatever your personal brand of geekiness requires, you ain't the bag of chips you said you were.)

Purdy has the right idea: there is something that needs changing, a focus that needs shifting. But he has the wrong target. A poor end can still be an extremely effective means. A call to bring an end to cynicism will naturally bring about a backlash, both from those who see it as a value and those who simply don't want their toolboxes rifled.

I can't say I'd miss irony as a value, but I would deeply mourn the loss of irony as a virtue. Let's face it: funny and acerbic are fun to read, fun to listen to and fun to create. "It's getting old" is another way of saying "It has no new substance." Honesty and integrity do not by necessity imply starkness. As long as the substance is present, does it really matter whether the style is dry in terms of wit or dry in terms of seriousness?

Not to me, anyway. And not to Ponceludon, either. In the epilogue to Ridicule, Ponceludon stands on the cliffs of Dover with his friend M. Bellegarde. The two of them have barely escaped the Revolution by fleeing to England. As they look out across the ocean, a wind kicks up and blows Bellegarde’s hat off his head, into the water below. Bellegarde is frustrated, but Ponceludon consoles him: "Better to be without a hat than without a head."

"Ah!" exclaims Bellegarde, the man who swears he has left wit behind forever. "Humor!"

Today's Cool Word is "fabulist." Warms my retromodernist little heart, it does. Robert "The Fabulators" Scholes, whither goest thou?

Now it's off to Starbucks to avoid the coffee and demo Deluxe Illuminati with the other MIBs. They may have shitty chai, but they do have nice tables.

So as I'm driving, a public service announcement comes on the radio, informing concerned parents that they need to train their kids in traffic safety, because 31% of children ages 5 to 9 are killed by walking in traffic.

Somehow I knew our childhood mortality figures were a little off ...