BOOK OF THE DAY: Snark, by David Denby, Picador, 128pp, £9.99
IT TAKES either a brave or foolhardy person to stand up against the bullies of the internet and challenge them to please refrain from making nasty comments. On the evidence of Snark, it is not exactly clear whether David Denby is brave or foolhardy or both, but he is at the very least admirably committed to raising the tone of our discourse.
Denby is one of two film critics at the New Yorker(the other is the justly respected Anthony Lane). In this extended essay, he steps outside his field of expertise to make a clarion call against what he sees as an increasing pattern of snide and mean-spirited commentary.
In doing so, he is to a degree following in the footsteps of his New Yorkercolleague Malcolm Gladwell, that celebrated observer of social trends. But whereas Gladwell's writing illuminates with its incisive and imaginative analysis, Denby's effort lacks the intellectual rigour and overarching vision required to make a convincing case against snark. In fact, he struggles even for a definition.
“What, then, is meant by modern snark?” he asks. “Abuse in a public forum, of course. But abuse of a particular kind – personal, low, teasing, rug-pulling, finger-pointing, snide, obvious, and knowing.” This sounds simple enough, but he spends far more time telling us what snark is not – than what it is. His examples are so random and disorganised that they utterly fail to illustrate snark – instead, they read like a jumbled list of things that irk David Denby.
The etymology of the word is interesting, with a discussion on Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, but the attempted "brief, highly intermittent history" of the phenomenon itself is a conceit too far – Athenian drinking dens and Juvenal, in Denby's imagined timeline, were the progenitors of modern snark.
The greatest weakness of Denby’s essay, though, is that the entire “trend” of snark is essentially one person’s observation that there are lots of malicious things written on the internet. And while I’m not denying that there are lots of exceptionally mean-spirited people hiding behind online anonymity, this rather seems like exclusively hanging out with rude, self-absorbed jerks and then complaining about the declining state of humanity.
This book, rather than serving as a meaningful critique and antidote to snark, instead functions as an open invitation to be snarky. Denby has dismissed criticism of his book as the inevitable hackles of resolute snarkers, but it is not an act of snark to bemoan logical fallacies, and it isn’t a defence of snark to suggest that Denby lacks the wit to tackle witlessness of any variety.
Denby lavishes praise on satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but it is one of their acolytes, actor Rob Corddry, who concisely manages to achieve something that Denby so singularly fails to do, and all in the space of two tweets.
“The ‘meh’ phenomenon is perhaps the greatest gift the internet has given dumb people,” Corddry tweeted in August. “‘Meh’ allows people to be condescending without doing any real heavy lifting.” Corddry here manages to ridicule, critique and dismiss an entire “meme”, deconstructing that apathetic, dismissive syllable in just 26 words, which is more than Denby manages to do with snark in the space of 128 pages. Ultimately, while snark might be disagreeable, verbose polemics are unforgiveable.
Davin O’Dwyer is a freelance journalist