The sarcasm to irony in FRIENDS

 Katie West 

March 17, 2020 

Blog Post

The sarcasm to irony in FRIENDS


        When I think of sarcasm my mind immediately goes to the late 1990s & the early 2000s hit TV show Friends. My mind quickly associates Chandler Bing with sarcasm. Chandler’s character is defined by his funny, witty, and mainly sarcastic one-liners throughout the show and at one point his character even states, “'I'm not great at advice. But can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?” (Season 8, Episode 17). Or another famous comment being, “I'm glad we're having a rehearsal dinner. i so rarely get to practice my meals before I eat them” (Season10, episode 12). However, in Francesca Gino’s piece The Surprising Benefits of Sarcasm she explores the many benefits but also downsides to sarcastic humor. Gino expresses how “Not surprisingly, the participants exposed to sarcasm reported more interpersonal conflict than those in other groups” showing how those who use sarcasm often use it as a way of expressing their feelings, their past, or their hardships. When I took a step back and think about the character of Chandler; his parents were divorced because his father had an affair with their ‘pool boy’ and his father comes out as gay while becoming a drag queen in Los Angels. Out of the cast, Chandler and Phoebe have the hardest and most unique upbringing and they are the most sarcastic characters.

        In The Surprising Benefits of Sarcasm Gino states that sarcasm is “the most common form of verbal irony” making me think of how sarcasm and irony relate to one another--they are the same style of humor except sarcasm is just much lower and much more detrimental. In the piece “Convergence: Irony and Urban Indian Epistemologies in Tommy Orange’s There There” by Juniper Ellis we see how Tommy Orange’s novel There There uses irony to express the harm and unfair treatment of Native Americans in America. And, as Gino stated in her article and seen in Friends, sarcasm is often a way to tell the story of one's hardships. And Tommy Orange uses irony, which is defined as sarcasm’s common verbal form”. So if this is true, is the way that Chandler uses sarcasm to cope with his parents in a verbal manner then is Orange doing the same thing in a writing style with Irony. Is Chandler just sarcastic because he is speaking and is Orange just ironic because he is writing?. Ellis states that “Orange confronts brutal historic and ongoing attempts to erase Indigenous people through crude physical and epistemic violence, presenting through “the native humanistic tease, vital irony, spirit, cast of mind, and moral courage” similar to how so many individuals use sarcasm to share a hardship, Orange is using irony to write on the awful treatment Native Americans face. 

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