The History of Sarcasm, Unfortunately

Historians estimate that sarcasm has existed for as long as humans have needed to disagree with each other without the paperwork of an actual argument, and the archive team at Sarcasm Without Borders has spent an unreasonable amount of time compiling its greatest, most avoidable hits.

The ancient Greeks are widely credited with formalizing the practice, deriving the word itself from a root meaning roughly “to tear flesh,” which historians agree is an alarming origin story for a tone of voice now primarily used to comment on group chat behavior.

By the medieval period, court jesters had professionalized sarcasm into a full-time occupation, delivering criticism to royalty under the protective cover of a joke, a business model our own Department of Deadpan Affairs regards with something close to reverence.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced a golden age of dry written correspondence, in which entire wars of politeness were fought via letter, each side saying something devastating while appearing, on paper, extremely calm about it. Scholars refer to this period as “peak restraint.”

The twentieth century introduced sarcasm to mass media, radio, and eventually the sitcom laugh track, which had the unfortunate side effect of teaching several generations that sarcasm requires a studio audience to be confirmed as a joke.

The internet, our final chapter, complicated matters considerably by removing tone of voice entirely and replacing it with punctuation, capitalization, and a small, overworked emoji expected to carry the full emotional weight of the sentence it follows.

Which brings us to today, an era in which sarcasm crosses borders instantly, is frequently misread as sincerity, and occasionally requires a follow-up text clarifying “that was a joke, by the way.” It is, we admit, not our organization’s finest chapter. It is, however, the one we were founded to address, and we remain committed to it, historically uninformed as that commitment may be.