January 25, 2008
The sardonic
Suzanne Pleshette’s recent obituary recounted her beauty and her husky voice, then it added that she was “best known for her role as Bob Newhart’s sardonic wife on television’s long-running The Bob Newhart Show.”
I can never remember enough about sardonic ever to get facile with it and always have to look it up. Webster beats around the bush, settles by saying that sardonic and satire are synonyms, an equation I don’t find all that helpful. No less a language guru than H W Fowler in his Modern English Usage (Oxford, 1950, pp 240f) is all too shrewd to dare anything so defining as a definition. But he does have a way of getting around it so as to leave enough loopholes for some prosaic license. First he classifies humour (aka Britspeak) along with seven other varieties — wit, satire, and sarcasm, invective, irony, and cynicism, then lists sardonic all by its lonely, but not without singling it out as “the sardonic.”
Once being done with that and, as I said, offering no definitions, he suggests that a “sort of tabular statement may be of service against some popular misconceptions.” These tables are for each entry its “motive or aim, its province, its method or means, and its proper audience.” For example, irony’s aim is exclusiveness, its province is statement of facts, its method is mystification, and its audience is an inner circle. Following the same pattern, satire aims to amend a province of morals and manners by accentuation for an audience of the self-satisfied.
The sardonic, Fowler suggests, aims for the self-relief of adversity through pessimism for an audience of ones own self. All this is well and good, I suppose, but I’ve wrangled with all these for some time and never been all that satisfied. Not content with Fowler, I asked another pro.
Louie Crew, an erstwhile emeritus and highly honored professor of English at no less than Rutgers University, wrote back that he’d “give it a try,” and ventured, “With sardonic humor, the humorist seeks personal relief regarding the object of his/her humor. Sardonic humor arises out of adversity and is used by pessimists mainly by directing the humor at herself/himself.” Like any good teacher and just to make sure I might finally get it, he illustrated with an example: “‘No, I think that too might be misunderstood,’ Rowan Williams said to himself in New Orleans as he put down his shaving mug and razor.”
I wondered if that’s not rather like saying “the jokes on me,” but still not with much certainty. Then it dawned on me that Crew is enough of a rascal to make it so.
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Note: For those who may be puzzled by all this sudden pedantry: Williams, the rather daemonically-bearded Archbishop of Canterbury, met recently in New Orleans with The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops which it probably seems to him has not often understood him all that well.
As for Ms Pleshette, that must surely have been what she was up to, as well.
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