The Joke's audience: the ironic decoder ring
which art-film habitués of course thought was a cleverly ironic anti-ad joke, and so they’d shell out for little paper theater tickets and file in
Context
Irony as the audience's self-defeating decoder ring. The Joke's anti-ad warning — "You Are Strongly Advised NOT To Shell Out Money to See This Film" — is read by art-film habitués as "a cleverly ironic anti-ad joke," and their very sophistication is the trap. They pay because they decode the plain warning as irony; the too-clever reader who assumes everything is ironic cannot take a sincere caution sincerely, and files in to watch the film mirror his own ripped-off face back at him. The ironic decoder ring is the exact mechanism of his humiliation — the joke is on the one who is sure he's in on it. (The Joke / Medusa-Odalisque / Found Drama filmography substance is film-optics'; cf. n024, 087.)