David Foster Wallace and the Comedy Nerd

TL;DR

A 2012 SplitSider (Awl-network comedy site) essay by Blythe Roberson asking why comedians and comedy writers are so disproportionately drawn to Wallace. Its answer — "Wallace was a comedy nerd" who theorized comedy and entertainment — makes it a genuinely IJ-relevant reception piece: it reads Infinite Jest as the extreme dramatization of the anti-irony argument of "E Unibus Pluram", with the novel's AA material offered as the model of the sincere, plain, "maximally unironic" speech that irony cannot manage. Roberson traces a line from Wallace's 1990 call for "anti-rebels" to the sincere-sitcom turn of Parks and Recreation (whose showrunner Mike Schur wrote a Harvard thesis on Infinite Jest and directed the Decemberists' Eschaton-staging music video). A light piece next to the academic criticism, but a sharp document of the comedy world's Wallace readership.

Key claims

• The comedy-world fandom, documented: "Mike Schur, showrunner of Parks and Recreation, is obsessed with David Foster Wallace." "At Harvard, he made Wallace an honorary member of the Lampoon and wrote his thesis about Infinite Jest." "His wife banned him from discussing the book at social gatherings." Adam Scott, Nick Offerman, Rob Delaney and others read Pale King monologues; Tina Fey name-checks Wallace in Bossypants; Roberson read IJ while interning at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
• Wallace's comedy theory: via "Laughing with Kafka", the best jokes and best short stories both leave out information but evoke it "in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections"; "jokes are a kind of art." Kafka is the standard-bearer of artful jokes, funny in their "grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity".
• The E-Unibus-Pluram frame: TV is "low art" whose mission is "to ensure as much watching as possible"; sitcoms are broad because "people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and prurient interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests." Irony was the reaction to dumb sitcoms and became TV's self-defense, but "irony is not sustaining; its function is wholly negative" — "And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us".
• Infinite Jest as the argument taken to the limit: "Infinite Jest takes Wallace's theory on the failings of ironic humor to the extreme." Most characters "embody a deep, cynical, problematic irony"; "Only one character is completely sincere, and he is a grotesque" (for his sincerity as much as his deformity); Orin, one of the most ironic, mourns "sneering at something I love."
• AA as the sincerity method: "Infinite Jest is obsessed with masks and veils, metaphors for the way irony lets us hide and distance ourselves from each other." At AA "all that is asked is the genuine truth"; a story "can't be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic." Roberson reads AA's empathy and plainness as "the secret to humor that is sincere and kind".
• The masks passage: she quotes the novel's meditation on how "We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age" as the statement of "how America's unrelenting irony is a human tragedy"
• The anti-rebels come true on TV: Wallace's 1990 forecast of "anti-rebels" — who, in her gloss, "bravely embrace and take seriously sincerity" — she reads as fulfilled by Parks and Recreation, Louie, Community, and the sincere turn of late-night comedy — a reception-history claim, not a claim about the novel.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest dramatizes "E Unibus Pluram" to its limit — the novel's world is irony-poisoned, and its AA material models the sincere, "maximally unironic" plainness that is the cure

• Crux: irony-vs-recovery
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Reads IJ as the fictional extension of Wallace's own EUP argument that irony's "function is wholly negative." [sec. mid-essay]
  • [text] The AA speech test — a story "can't be a calculated crowd-pleaser… maximally unironic" — cited as the novel's positive model (scene 076, pp. 367-375). [sec.]
  • [text] The "fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony" meditation cited as the diagnosis of ironic culture as human tragedy (scene 135, pp. 692-698). [sec.]
  • [text] Orin's "sneering at something I love" cited as the ironist's self-wound (scene 119, pp. 596-601). [sec.]
• Notes: Roberson herself flags the elitist edge of Wallace's position ("casual elitism is just a part of Wallace's style"), a self-raised qualification kept here. The masks passage she attributes loosely to "another character's consciousness"; in the novel it sits in the Hal-focalized meditation on his generation's hiddenness (scene 135) — narration in a generational "we", not any one character's speech. The reading endorses an existing irony-and-sincerity line on the novel rather than originating a claim.

Themes

Entertainment and irony (the EUP diagnosis, TV as low art); sincerity and recovery (AA plainness as the sincere alternative); communication and solipsism (masks and veils that "hide and distance ourselves"); comedy as an art form (Kafka, the joke-as-explosion theory).

Cross-references

• Squarely in the irony/sincerity line of Wallace reception, and a comedy-culture counterpart to the memorial appreciation raintaxi-jacobs-the-fight, which makes the same metafiction-redeployed-for-sincerity turn.
• The music video the essay credits to Schur — his video for the Decemberists' "Calamity Song", staging the novel's Eschaton game — is analyzed at length in the Wallace-Week visual essays, viz-wallace-week-2012.
• Novel anchors: scene 076 (the AA "maximally unironic" testimony, pp. 367-375), scene 119 (Orin's "sneering at something I love", pp. 596-601), scene 135 (the "masks of ennui" meditation, pp. 692-698).

Notable passages

• "Infinite Jest takes Wallace's theory on the failings of ironic humor to the extreme." (Roberson)
• "Infinite Jest is obsessed with masks and veils, metaphors for the way irony lets us hide and distance ourselves from each other." (Roberson)
• "And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us" (Roberson, glossing EUP)
• "Only one character is completely sincere, and he is a grotesque" (Roberson, on Mario)