"Irony is necessarily subversive because it means the opposite of what it says; but the risk of post-modern irony is that it subverts not what it sets out to critique, but the critical agency of the message itself. Just as sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, irony is the feeblest kind of indictment. And yet it has become the go-to rhetorical stance of the post-modernist. By maintaining a cool, affectless stance, irony colludes, unconsciously or otherwise, with what it overtly disdains."

– Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere