Somewhere along the way, sarcasm became our cultural default. Not wit, not satire, not irony—the good stuff that once made minds turn and ideas stick—but sarcasm, the half-smirked, low-effort cousin of cleverness. These days, if you want to stand out in the vast noise of public discourse, you don’t sharpen your point—you coat it in snark and hope it cuts through the haze with enough attitude to get a reaction. I’m not innocent in this shift; I swing the sarcasm bat just like the rest. But, like any good narcissist with a fragile ego, I like to imagine my commentary is a few rungs above the rest. Spoiler: it’s probably not.
I don’t know when the tipping point happened. Maybe it was with Jonathan Swift and his famously absurd “Modest Proposal”—a brilliant piece of dark satire suggesting that the poor could solve their hunger by selling their children as food to the rich. Now that was sarcasm with soul. That was rage wrapped in refinement. Swift didn’t just jab for sport; he used the absurd to illuminate the grotesque truths of his time. It was a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
Then there were the greats—Twain, Vonnegut—writers who could hold up a funhouse mirror to society and make us laugh just enough to feel safe, right before they dropped the truth like a gut punch. Their humor was never aimless; it had purpose, and more importantly, it had restraint. They didn’t just mock—they made us think.
Now? The average social media exchange resembles a sarcastic pie fight with no real target. A friend posts a thought—tentative, maybe even thoughtful—and they’re met with a dozen smug replies dripping with condescension and the rhetorical equivalent of raised eyebrows. We’ve replaced discussion with dunks, and discourse with dunks followed by “LOL” or “just kidding,” as if that somehow negates the venom.
News flash: Nobody is ever just kidding. There’s always a shard of sincerity buried in the barb. And we all know it. That’s what makes it sting more.
The internet has turned sarcasm from a nuanced art into a blunt instrument—used less to enlighten and more to establish dominance, or worse, to shield ourselves from vulnerability. After all, if you’re always sarcastic, no one can really tell what you believe. And if they can’t tell what you believe, they can’t tear you down, right?
But maybe we’ve lost something in the process. Something vital. Because while sarcasm can be clever, it rarely connects. It rarely creates understanding. More often, it just builds walls.
As Thumper once wisely said, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.” But maybe it’s time we updated that advice for today: If you can’t say something kind, or at least constructive, maybe don’t hide behind a LOL.
