Stuff You Should Know - How Sarcasm Works

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

In this episode, we get to the bottom of why people sometimes talk like jerks some and how sarcasm isn’t all bad. Stand back everybody, this one is just soooo great.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Find the Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Dave Koestens in here with us. I just heard him laugh and snicker to himself, which is always a heartwarming sound. I think it's because you mispronounced his name. No, no, I said it right.

Koestens. I thought it was Coustein. No, that's what you want it to sound like when you're French. No, this is Coustein. Oh, okay. Like Houston. Exactly, but with a C instead of an H. Coustein means that I'm one day closer to you.

What? That's a song, right? I don't know. Houston means that I'm one step closer to you. Oh, gotcha. I've never heard that song. That's an old country jam. Oh, okay.

I was going to guess Dionne Warwick. No. She always like singing about... Houston? Yeah. About San Jose, et cetera. Oh, okay. That was a Baccarac, Burt Baccarac song, and she popularized it because she did it so

well. Do you know the way to San Jose? Oh, okay. I didn't know she sang that. Oh, yeah. I guess she popularized it with everyone but you. That was sarcastic. No, that was pretty straightforward directly.

Sarcastic would have been like... Oh, I'm sure you didn't know that. Yeah. I guess that would be sarcastic. It wouldn't have made much sense, but yes. You know what's funny, Chuck, in researching this? I kept trying to come up with examples of sarcasm, and it's one of the hardest things in the world to do with thought.

Sarcasm is almost always off the cuff or not very well thought out, which I think is one reason why most people agree that somebody who is employing sarcasm, even when they're not very good at it, is the funniest person in the world right then. See, that's sarcasm. I can't help myself. Yeah, this researching sarcasm really makes you take a long, hard look in the mirror, doesn't it? It really does.

And at people who are big fans of Deadpool. Oh, I do like Deadpool. Oh, yeah. Here's my deal with sarcasm. It is... Lay it on us. I mean, I definitely can be sarcastic. I think all of us can be, and I think it can be used for funsies, but I definitely see

where I can be a real a-hole sometimes by being sarcastic, like to Emily, and that's like the sort of... That goes back to my end, boy, I'm sort of revealing some stuff here, but it falls under the umbrella of my communication issues instead of being like straightforward with something, maybe being sarcastic, but passive-aggressive, and me and sarcasm all kind of go hand in hand, I think. Yeah, so you've hit upon something that I think is not really necessarily obvious to just anybody when they are confronted with sarcasm.

I'm a big jerk. No, sarcasm is a way to hide. It's a way to hide from emotions. It's a way to hide from direct conflict if you're not big into conflict. It's a way to hide from criticizing somebody when you're not big into that, but you really need to or you want to, and you said it, it's passive-aggressive, but I think we should make the distinction, and I came across this very late in research, but it makes a lot of sense to me that there's a distinction between sarcasm and verbal irony, and that

sarcasm is at its core insulting, mocking, harmful, and hurtful, whereas verbal irony is just basically a joke where no one gets insulted, where maybe a situation is being made fun of. Great weather today, huh? Exactly, if it's raining cats and dogs. That would be verbal irony, not sarcasm. I saw a really great example about the distinction on, I can't remember, it was like a TV and film writing website, but they basically said, in that sense, that would be verbal irony,

but if you were the spouse of a meteorologist who forecast a sunny day, when they came home and it was raining cats and dogs, and you said, great weather today, that would be sarcasm because you're insulting or mocking them for getting it wrong. Right, like let's say you and I are neighbors, great weather today, Josh, oh, you said it there neighbor. Hey, I can speak for myself, oh, you said it there neighbor. Different than, hey, nice job with your front lawn, Josh. Right, and I'd say thanks.

Swimming underwater, you're the six-year-old that takes everything literally. Exactly, yeah. Because I have noticed that, what made me think of sarcasm, you picked this article, but I was like, it's kind of perfect because having a kid will make you realize how often you're sarcastic because they don't get it, at least not yet. She's just turned six, same day as you, happy birthday. Yeah, happy birthday Ruby too. And very sweet gifts that you sent, and you guys exchanged video messages, which was adorable,

but she's six and she still doesn't get sarcasm, and I've had to say, that was sarcasm, and she's like, what? And I'm like, man, why, just keep that purity alive of them taking things literally. Yeah, yeah. Don't introduce sarcasm to your kid, but you can't help it. No, and that's the thing, there's a whole school of thought that it's like, to heck with sarcasm, we don't need it. People who use sarcasm are annoying, insecure people.

It's not a nice thing to do or say, there's better ways of getting your point across, and it's not even particularly funny. But the thing is, is I've found that when you follow that thread, there's something inherently problematic with it, and that there is some value to sarcasm in some instances. It's just one of those things that should be wielded very delicately and infrequently and in the right context, but if you do it like that, sure. And if you do it like that though, it can be very useful, and actually some studies have found that it's actually beneficial brain-wise too.

Although researching all the sarcasm stuff has just reiterated my belief that social psychology as a field should be completely dissolved and they should just start from scratch again, because it is almost exclusively useless. Yeah. It is so bad, dude. We should have a... Every time you go off on social psychology, we should have a sound effect. We should start employing more sound effects.

Just get that... We should hire a barbershop quartet just full-time to stand behind us. Made up exclusively of social psychologists. Exactly. Who can also sing those sweet, sweet tunes. So Webster's defines... That's a great start, Chuck. It's actually the Oxford English Dictionary.

If you want to go back to the original definition, which I think it is useful, we don't love to redefinitions, but its first definition was a sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark, a bitter, jibe, or taunt, and the word itself even derives from ancient Greek from to tear flesh, gnash the teeth, and speak bitterly. So it seems like from the beginning, sarcasm was not like a nice and super funny thing for people. No. I think Greeks had their own famous sarcast and socrates, who was known for what's now

known as sarco-socratic irony, which is terrible, where basically you play dumb when you're talking to somebody in order to kind of get their true opinion out about something and then you destroy their opinion and you suddenly become intelligent and destroy their opinion. It's a terrible, terrible thing to do, but apparently socrates was well known for that kind of thing. And so that they named it after him. That's right. It's called the How About Them Apples approach.

Interpreting sarcasm, that's where it gets tricky because, and that's why a six-year-old, and we'll get to kids more because some people say that by that age they can detect sarcasm, but we'll get to that. I'm glad that my daughter can't yet because that means that she's not a jerk yet. But as far as picking up on these clues, the words themselves you can't rely on. So what you're looking for are other kinds of clues that are myriad, one of which is obviously the tone of voice. Let's say you can't even see the person.

If you see someone say, huh, great weather today, like, you know, without even looking out the window, that probably means it's raining or something. Yeah. Don't even need to look. Don't even need to do the effort. Right. And some people say that that's a nasal tone. This kind of seemed a little hinky to me, but some researchers have said that there's

a connection between that sarcasm and extreme disgust, and that's why it comes out nasally. Like you're trying to expel something through like your mouth and your nose. Like great weather, like your nose wrinkles, I guess, a little bit. I can see it. Maybe. And then, of course, their physical cues, like a good eye roll, or at least like looking up when you say something is a big, big clue. Yeah.

That one in particular is because your brain is going haywire because you're saying the opposite of what you mean, and researchers have concluded that looking up, which kind of looks like an eye roll, is actually processing difficulty. Really? Your brain is like, I don't know, dude, just make the eyes look up while I try to figure out what I'm doing here. Wow. Yeah.

There's social psychology's big contribution. As far as the intonation, there's some researchers that have called that inverse pitch abtrusion, which great weather is, if it was really great weather, you would say great weather today, huh? And if not, you'd say great weather. So your tone and your intonation goes down as a clear signal of sarcasm. Yeah, which supposedly intonation or pitch, inverse pitch abtrusion is pretty universal as far as languages go, or different cultures.

Yeah, because other cultures are sarcastic, it's not just American. No, and there's a big debate online about whether it's a universal, whether sarcasm is universal. And some people are saying, yes, it's everywhere. Even if a culture has a taboo against it, which some could, although I couldn't find which ones. I think China's widely pointed to is not a very high sarcasm culture. But if your culture has a taboo against sarcasm, you have to be aware of sarcasm to have a

taboo against it. So it's still in that sense, universally, even if it's not universally used or accepted by each culture. Yeah, for sure. I could see Japan as not being super sarcastic. So I read an article about Japan. And it was like a business writer's experience, like a British expat working in Japan. And he said he used sarcasm, and he didn't really get much laugh, much of a laugh.

And later on, he said he was explaining it to his Japanese colleague, and the colleague was like, oh, I know, it was sarcasm. We know all about sarcasm. Thank you. You're an ale. That was grossly inappropriate to use it right then. That's funny. I think I was like, oh, okay, good to know, good to know.

I love it. Yeah. Oh, we know what sarcasm is. Yeah, that was just not good, sorry. Another thing you can do is elongate your words. It's much different to say, oh, sorry, than to say, sorry. Yes, that's a great one. That's intonation and elongating a word, I guess, combined with that eye roll.

You can also go the opposite way and take a word that should be said kind of with oomph and deflating it. Yeah. I'm big on that one. Like wow. Yeah. Great. Mm-hmm.

I'd say that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We are very sarcastic people. I've come to realize. I use, for some reason, I know you didn't see Fletch and you hate Chevy Chase. Boo.

But I... Wait, no, no, I'm sorry. I love Chevy Chase. What are you talking about? Oh, yeah. He's my favorite. He's so funny. I would use a line from his Fletch occasionally, I don't know why I would use it.

I guess whenever there was a cop or something, I would say, thank God, the police. He says that line like that in the movie. Yeah. I can totally see it. Wearing a baseball cap too, all wager. Probably, maybe. You mentioned other cultures. If you were a teacher of ESOL, English is the second language, that is one of the trickier

parts of teaching English to people as a second language as adult tourist kids, even, is trying to teach them things like sarcasm if they're not super familiar with it. Sometimes, apparently, they will say, here, watch this TV show because there's quite a bit of sarcasm on TV sitcoms. Yeah. Supposedly, that's a really good way to pick up on sarcasm is watching sitcoms, probably friends in particular, I would guess. I'm guessing they assign friends a lot.

Could they be any more sarcastic? So Chuck, this is a kind of a willy-nilly episode, and I kind of like them that way. I'm just going to go ahead and confess. So there's no clear place where we should put an ad break in. So I suggest that we put an ad break in right about here. That's a great idea. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb?

And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home, now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

And so my husband, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuxnet. Who's Stuxnet? Stuxnet. I don't know. You know it's Stuxnet. Is it in this?

Stuxnet. Stuxnet. That's the name of it. I know. It's a great name. All right. Stuxnet. With an X.

You know, I have to say when I was researching this, Chuck, I was wondering if we were going to just do the weird thing and not be sarcastic. No. I just think that that was never going to happen, was it? No. I think it was clear from the beginning to me that we were going to throw our own little brand of sarcasm in. Can't help it, Chuck.

I can't tell if you're being straight or not. I can't either, Chuck. So we're talking about kids and whether or not they understand sarcasm. And there's been some research on this kind of thing. And of course it's come up with contradictory findings. One thing I saw was that kids, you kept mentioning six-year-olds, not really getting sarcasm. That's about when they start to pick it up somewhere around age six. That's when they start grade school.

Okay. As they can do with it. Maybe so. But from what I saw, they might recognize it as sarcasm. They just don't understand it as a way to employ humor. And that comes at about age 10, which happens to coincide when kids become obnoxious. Yeah. And then you reap what you sow as a parent because you're like, I taught you this method

and now it's being used against me. Like a weapon. There was a study in France of French-speaking kids in 2005 that showed kids at age of five understood sarcasm when the sarcastic speaker was using intonation, where it took to be over seven to be able to tell by context. And context is when like, I think the example they use in the article was, if you're like having a longer conversation about a family member being a bad gift giver and then at the very end you say, but I love my sweater that they got me.

And maybe see, like I said, it even sort of regular, but contextually, it would still be sarcastic. I don't know. Like even in that example, I just found it confusing to tell you. Well, I guess it could be. I was a little too. I sold it too well. Yeah.

It sounded really genuinely earnest. Right. That's the slippery slope of sarcasm. So one of the other, in addition to kids not necessarily getting sarcasm, people with dementia or Alzheimer's or brain lesions have been found to not necessarily get sarcasm. And if you stop picking up on sarcasm all of a sudden, that's a really good indicator that you might need to go get an MRI too sweet. Yeah, for sure.

And not just that, there are all kinds of neurodiversities that people can have that make them not able to pick up on sarcasm. I know that sometimes people with autism have difficulty understanding sarcasm. They might take things a little more literally than neurotypical people might. So it's, you know, you got to know who you're dealing with when you're throwing sarcasm around and being sensitive, that kind of thing. Right. For sure.

So people with autism are famously kind of associated with an inability to detect sarcasm. And from what I've seen, that's not really the best way to put it, that many people with autism can detect sarcasm, use sarcasm. Some find it funny. Others can recognize it, but don't necessarily find it funny. But there's different, I don't know if they're competing or not, but there's different theories as to why that's the case. Right.

Supposedly, people with autism tend to use more literal thinking than the kind of, well, let me just say, sarcasm is known as a form of unplane speaking along with some other kinds like forced politeness where you like are nice to somebody who's got you hate or using aphorisms or ritual language like when you say, I'm fine when somebody asks you how you're doing, even though you're not fine, sarcasm falls under that. It's not saying what you mean directly. And so if people with autism tend to use direct thinking and literal thinking, if you use indirect or unplane speaking, it's going to be hard for them to pick up on.

They're going to take it at its literal meaning that they might not pick up on the sarcasm. And so that kind of tendency to think literally combined with an undeveloped theory of mind, which is where you can put yourself in the other person's shoes and imagine what they're thinking easily, which is what sarcasm requires you to do because they're saying something different, but you know that's not what they mean. And that requires that you go into their mind and tool around. Those two things combined tend to explain why people with autism are kind of thought of as not detecting sarcasm.

Right. All right. Okay. You got it. Good job. Okay. Thanks. Thanks.

If I had rainbow suspenders on right now, I would have just snapped them after them. I actually had those when I was a kid. I wanted those for a long time. Yeah. I mean, it was the whole Mork and Mindy thing. I even had the buttons on them and I wore the khaki pants. I did my best to be Mork for Mork. Yeah.

Mork's suspenders are obviously primo, but there's an overlooked vest, a puffy vest that he wears in the credits when they're on the football field that I would say even top the rainbow suspenders. I would love to get my hands on that vest. Yeah. Looking back, I was trying to be a Mork from Mork, but I was dork from dork. Clearly. I don't have any pictures of that, unfortunately.

Can you imagine me wearing those with like a spinning bow tie? Yeah. Like now? No, especially as a kid. Now I would just be like, I don't know about this guy, but this is a kid wearing that. You'd be all right. If you're talking about the brain, there was a study in 2005 that, and this kind of stuff is always, I feel like we just have to say it, even though people are like, okay, those

are the three parts of the brain means nothing to me. That's it. But the three parts, the language cortex in the left hemisphere, the frontal lobes and the right hemisphere and the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex, you're going to hear the comment and your language cortex kicks in and understands the literal meaning, great weather, right? Then the frontal lobe and the right hemisphere have the context. It's raining and then that right ventromedial prefrontal cortex puts the two together and

it goes sarcasm, dummy. Right. And the laugh region goes bananas. Yeah, the laugh region. Sometimes it can be funny, but you've got to really be good at it. So Chuck, I was talking about how sarcasm qualifies as unplane speaking. That's like the general umbrella that it falls under, right? Yes.

And the fact that it is unplane speaking, where you can get a message across just as easily, directly saying, the weather sucks today, what is the point then of using sarcasm of saying great weather today rather than this weather sucks today? And so linguists, researchers, you know, speech scientists, talky doctors, all these people together have come up with this idea that there must be some additional thing that's going on there, clearly, that there is something gained by using sarcasm over using the direct message that gets the same point across because sarcasm's got a little extra mustard on it. And they've tried to get to the bottom of exactly what that mustard is.

And I'm sorry to use mustard, I know you don't like it very much. Yeah. And by the way, my dog might actually be barking some in this episode and there's just nothing I can do about it today. I think that makes it folksy. We usually try and edit that out, but we'll just see. There are a couple of ideas on why people do it, like when it's a purposeful thing and not just like I'm trying to be funny or whatever.

Sometimes, well, sometimes it could just be as easy as like you have a very hard time being straightforward with someone. And like you said, you use it to hide, you use it as a defense or something like that. Being something in a positive term, oh, you did a really great job with that episode, Josh. That's sarcastic criticism, whereas you can do the exact opposite. If you and I were out, I mean, the example that you use in the article is fishing and I'm not catching any fish and you're just like catching tons of fish. I'm like, oh boy, you really suck at that fishing thing.

That is a sarcastic compliment. And this is all wrapped up under what's called the tinge theory of sarcasm, which is you're trying to mute either your criticism or your praise of somebody by slapping that mustard on it. Yeah, by tinging it with iron, hence the name, right? There's also like a related one that really just kind of looks at the criticism part. It's called politeness theory and it basically just says that we use sarcasm to criticize because it makes the criticism more palatable.

And so you put that together and that is one interpretation of what sarcasm is there for. It's meant to boost, it's meant to mute either the compliment or the praise or the criticism. But then there's another one that basically says the exact opposite, that sarcasm is meant to be more biting, that it's meant to really make the mustard spicy and put it right into your eye. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. I think, I mean, I get the value somewhat of using sarcasm rather than, God, if you're

just straightforward about everything, it's like, it's sort of boorish. Like if, let's say you're with a friend who you're hanging out and your friend is always talking over you and you don't get a chance to get a word in edgewise and you made a little sarcastic dig in front of people like, oh no, I'm sure they're going to let me speak any minute now. That person would go, all right, I see what you're saying. It may be a little bit of a whole sarcastic comment, but what if someone was always just like pulling you aside and being like, you just never let me speak and it would just

really like, I think there are times to be straightforward like that, but if you're like that all the time, it's like, God, no one's going to want to be around you either. Or even if you didn't pull him aside at the table, if you were like, Chuck, I'm sorry, but it's my turn to speak. You're not letting me speak, so I'm going to speak now. Okay. I would really just like to be straightforward. Here's what I have to say.

I would be really straightforward rather than sarcastic. Yeah. That's going to just like, there's going to be a record scratch and like you said, no one wants to hang out with you. That's the worst. And that's what I was talking about the outset of this, that it's like the idea of just getting rid of sarcasm altogether, there's something inherently wrong with that because if used correctly, sarcasm is a, it's a social lubricant that just keeps things going.

It can keep the party going. Yeah. Totally. If everyone gets a laugh, it might be at their expense a little, they get the message and you don't like stop the fun of the party by having a real serious talk about interrupting people. Right. And then starting your point.

Right. Yeah. Then everyone wants to hear what you've got to say. Right. So, so the other idea is that sarcasm is used to make criticism more biting that it's basically like this, this, if I did just say, you know, you didn't screw that up or no, if I said, you know, Josh, you really screwed this episode up. I can't even criticize you hypothetically.

I'm sorry. If you said to me, Josh, you really screwed this episode up, I would be like, oh, well, go sit on it, Chuck. But if you said, boy, you didn't screw that episode up at all, Josh, I would be leveled for months, basically. And I think that's what that, that's what that theory is, the rival theory to tinge theory that, that it actually gives an even more emotional impact to criticism than it otherwise would have directly.

Yeah. And I think, not to get too personal, but I think you and I as partners have learned to deal with each other a little more straightforwardly over the years. And I think that's how we both prefer to be handled by each other as, and that's with us. Like it's a different for, it's not like I can be super sarcastic with other people, but I know that that wouldn't be a very nice thing to do to you. Does that make sense?

Sure. It makes sense. I think that you can be sarcastic with me. Well, I can be. Give it a try. Come on. Let's see what you got. I could be, I can be, just held their breath.

They're like, is he about to, to level Josh? Go ahead. No, no, no. I can be and I am sarcastic with you, but only in like fun ways. Like I would know never, I know now to not make, try and make a real point with you. Oh, I see. I see what you mean. Sure.

You know what I mean? And to have like a real conversation if it's real. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I got you.

I got you. Sure. Yeah. You know, this is everybody, you're just overthinking this. It's just humor. Like people are dressing up in otherwise boring or pedestrian point that they want to get across with, with just a little bit of humor and it's like sarcasm is an easy way to use humor.

Oscar Wilde said it was the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence. And that second part, I think he was referring to the fact that it, it takes some, some thinking to make a sarcastic comment and it also takes some thinking to decode it too. But it's not necessarily funny. Right. But that is supposedly the humor and it is another theory for why we use sarcasm that is just, it's just humor. And I think from researching all this, all of those make sense.

And social psychology in typical fashion has found findings that support all of them and none of them at the same time. Should we take a break? Sure. All right. Let's take a break. Let's take a little bit of the use of it throughout history and culture and arts and stuff like that.

Right after this. Hey, everybody. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel.

So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuxnet. Who's Stuxnet? Stuxnet.

I don't know what that is. You know it's Stuxnet. Is that in this? Stuxnet. Stuxnet. That's the name of it. I know. It's a great name.

All right. Stuxnet with an X. All right. If you want to talk literature, you can't get any more sarcastic at times than Mark Twain. Shakespeare was pretty sarcastic at times. Chaucer was fairly sarcastic at times. They used an example in this article of the Bible that I didn't read as sarcasm. I thought it was a bit of a stretch myself.

We'll go ahead and read it. This is from Ecclesiastes 11.9. Rejoice young man during your childhood and let your heart be pleasant during the days of young manhood and follow the impulses of your heart and the desires of your eyes. Yet know that God will bring you to judgment for all these things. That feels more just sort of like a one-two joke than sarcasm. I guess so. Yeah.

Yeah. It's got to be something in here and that's the best they could come up with. Maybe. We got to find some sarcasm in the Bible, guys. Right. Get to work. Right. The thing is with that, that kind of reveals one of the problems with sarcasm is that

when it's just written, especially when it's written a couple thousand years ago, it's really difficult to discern sarcasm. You have to use whatever cues you can get because you've had a lot of the normal cues stripped, like all those facial expressions, the intonation, all of that stuff is gone and now it's just the printed word. Basically, what you have is context. For that reason, and because we are entering, I guess we've already entered this digital age where the written word is basically how we convey thoughts now.

It's really taken a beating lately because study after study keeps finding that people grossly overestimate how clearly their sarcasm is coming through in texts and tweets and emails and stuff like that. It actually isn't being understood as sarcasm on the other end, even though the person who's sending the email or text thinks their sarcasm is clear as a bell. Yeah, just don't try to be sarcastic in emails, especially for work. I think it's just a good rule. It's like, don't even try because it's not going to come through.

Like you said, you probably think it does. It's not obvious to other people. If you're texting with friends and stuff, you can do things like overspell things like say great or say insert the iRoll emoji or even say sarcasm in parentheses or something like that. The one I've seen is the backslash s. Yeah, I mean that's definitely a thing. The forward slash s.

No, backslash. Which one is it? It's one of the slashes. It's a backslash followed by an s. So backslash s, because for the first few years of social media and texting and stuff like that, there was a lot of talk about how do we indicate sarcasm and the emojis help solve that problem, but you can't do that in emails. Like professional emails, you're not going to send an iRoll emoji.

No. Don't do it. Okay. You can't put three exclamation points at the end of that's great. Are we not doing that either? This is why I don't email anybody. I don't know what I'm doing, but when I do email them, it's at like 10 o'clock on a Saturday night.

One of the cons of sarcasm, like you said, you can use it and employ it in certain circumstances, but there are people who just think it is a hostile act and it is a way to say something and also let yourself off the hook for saying that thing at the same time and that it is hostility veiled as humor is how they put it in this article and at times it very much can be that. Yeah. The marriage counselors, therapists, basically anybody who's dedicated to improving you as a person in exchange for money has kind of zeroed in on the worst version of sarcasm.

The very strict definition of sarcasm is not verbal irony, but as an insult, as mocking somebody, as it being veiled hostility like you're saying, passive aggressiveness, that kind of thing, and that that is no way to communicate, especially with somebody that you care about or love, that you should be forthright, direct, honest with them. They're not saying like, make sure you cut out humor. They're basically saying sarcasm isn't humor. If you think it's humor, seriously, just go find better humor because there's plenty of better stuff out there.

Here's a knock, knock joke book. They're basically saying kind of just cut that out of your interpersonal relationships, at least again with people you care about, because it probably does mask passive aggressiveness and it's not doing anything but harming your relationship. In fact, John Gottman, who is a very renowned couples therapist, he and his wife are together, says that sarcasm is one of the indicators of contempt along with eye rolling, along with raising a lip, kind of in disgust while you're talking, that if you put these together, that you are signaling that you have contempt for your significant other and that contempt

is one of the, he calls them the four horsemen of a marriage, that it's a really good predictor of divorce when couples speak to each other with contempt and one of those ways that they'll speak to each other with contempt is through sarcasm. Yeah, and it's just not a pleasant, like, it's one thing to be sarcastic here and there, but I have a friend whose father, stepfather, rather, is the most sarcastic eye rolly person I've ever met in my life to an alarming degree and it's just so like, it's such a turn off to be around this dude. You're like, I don't want to have sex at all when I'm around him.

Certainly not with him, yeah, he just, and you can tell, like, his marriage has suffered and he can't be straight and it's just a chore to be around this guy. I hope he listens to this and is like, who's he talking about? He's talking about me and he changes his life. No, he would never listen to this. He wouldn't give me the satisfaction. So, wow, that guy, huh? Yeah, he's that guy.

So, this is not to say that there's like no, nothing good about sarcasm. There's this one group of social psychologists who made names for themselves by basically saying, no, no, we figured out that if you take a test of creativity immediately after engaging in a sarcastic exchange, you're going to score higher on that test of creativity than you would had you not been involved in a sarcastic exchange immediately beforehand. And that has been turned into in the popular press as sarcasm boosts creativity across the board. Yeah.

I guess the idea that it challenges you to think in a different way because it's not straightforward, may have a little something to it, but I don't know, it's a bit of a reach. There's other things, it provides social bonding like you and your friends being sarcastic about stuff, especially if you're being sarcastic about like a shared target. Yeah, like your teacher. Sure. That's a great example. It maintains social egalitarianism like taking that fisherman down a peg before he gets a

big ego for catching some fish and it can make you seem apparently as far as Harvard Business Review says, more competent and intelligent at work, which makes sense in that you do kind of have to be sharp. At the very least, you're paying a little more attention probably if you deliver a sarcastic remark successfully. Right. It's also risky. I could buy that.

You can also really come off looking like your friend's dad basically. Yeah. And just professionally like, I'll let stuff back and that's my advice. Yeah. So the one thing I saw was I came across a K state, I think it's Kansas state newspaper from like 2011, maybe, where they were talking about how sarcasm just totally pervades our society. They gave an example of how primed we are for sarcasm that when we encounter earnestness,

like we might be confused at first in some situations and the writer gave this great example of Michael Richards apology after he went on that racial tirade at the Laugh Factory and then like a couple of days later went on Letterman and the audience did not get some of the audience who hadn't heard about this, I guess, did not get that this was like a real apology. And part of it was his presentation that it seemed like he was doing a bit kind of. And the audience is kind of tittering and Jerry Seinfeld who was like in the studio with Letterman had to turn to the audience and be like, stop laughing.

It's not funny. And like tell them like he wasn't, that this wasn't sarcasm, that this was for real. And like if you go back and watch it, if you're a fan of laughing at things that make you deeply uncomfortable, like you will love that bit. It was, I remember it at the time. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that it was Kramer and it was hard to just take him seriously. Right.

That's exactly what it was. Yeah. Man, what a mess. Yeah. It was a mess. It made it even worse. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to go watch that again today.

Actually, I could use some cringe humor. Yeah. Um, you got anything else? Oh no, Josh, I had nothing else. Yeah. Check this went real well. We did a great job. Man, I'm annoying myself even now.

So let's just end this. I know, me too. Since I said I'm annoying myself, uh, let's go to Listen to Man. Uh, I'm going to call this Elton John song because why not? Hey guys, love, love, love your podcast and make it, make your way through the whole catalogue. Uh, I've been tempted to write, but I didn't think I had anything interesting to say before. You may not think it's interesting now, I do though. But what finally prompted me is, uh, when you were talking about Elton John in the Soul

Train episode so long ago, Josh said he'd never heard the song Burn Down the Mission. It made me think of the powerful song Ticking from Elton John's 74 Caribou album. The song was way ahead of its time in the way that it foretold many future events. I can't ever remember it being a popular, well-known song, but if you've not heard it, go listen to it. It gives me chills every time I hear it. Keep up the good work guys. And this is from Dinah Clay Melvin.

In Fort Worth, Texas. And I went back and looked at the lyrics and dude, Ticking is a song about a, uh, an aggressive ticking time bomb, white male shooter from 1974. And it's all right there. I'm assuming Bernie Taupin wrote it. I didn't look it up, but I think he was kind of writing all of his stuff back then. Who, Bernie Taupin? Yeah.

Oh, you do? That's a referential joke to another episode from the conversation we had. I guess probably in the episode that this guy's talking about. Oh boy. Um, but yeah, it's interesting to go back and listen to that song from early 1970s of, and of course it wasn't a big hit like she said, but it's, uh, I don't know, it's just interesting to hear that and be like, man, you can't, you couldn't write a song that on the nose today.

So there, he wasn't the only one who was predicting that at the time. Like Stephen King had a short story about a kid who comes in and like just shoots up his school. And it's basically just like this teenage revenge fantasy, but it was exactly what ended up happening like 20 years later. You wrote that in the seventies. I don't think I knew that. I can't remember what that one was called.

And then there's like, um, remember falling down that movie with Michael Douglas from the late 80s? Oh yeah. Uh-huh. That was basically about that as well. Yeah. So yeah, I could see, I just want to make sure we don't give Elton John undue credit here is kind of what I'm going after.

Oh man. Okay. Your classic beef with Elton John. All right. So I think we're at the end of this episode, aren't we? I hope we are. All right. Well, that was a little bit of short stuff crossover right there.

So let's, uh, let's end this as we normally do. If you want to get in touch with us like Dianna did, uh, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast. iHeartRadio.com Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.