1. I’m going to set fire to your irony

    A friend and I send tidbits of idiocy to each other in the form of Facebook profile screencaps. Generally it’s people we knew in college.

    He sent me one — subject line: MEET THE GOADS* — of a woman he knew from the scene, who now is married to some guy who’s my age but looks like an extra who got cut from Winter’s Bone because he was too scary. Her wall is full of histrionic posts with 30+ comments from concerned friends that invariably end with her mockingly replying GOD YOU STUPID FUCKING PUSSIES ARE GULLIBLE! And also requests for prayers for the Taliban fighters, pictures of retarded people in blackface, that sort of stuff. Her husband’s profile is a clever pastiche of personal injury photos and ironic racial slurs and homophobia. He has tattoos across his knuckles that read HORR and IBLE. He is “friends” with Idi Amin and Andrew Cunanan. And, unsurprisingly, he has a mustache.

    All of this is to say: Ferchrissake, aren’t we old enough to stop being so goddamned amused by ourselves?

    The other day on the B62 bus (a line that wends its way through nearly all the hipster enclaves of Brooklyn) I saw a hipster guy with a giant ironic mustache and this elaborate Hitler-bangs-side-part hairdo, plastered low to his forehead with a prodigious amount of pomade. From the front it was, momentarily, bus-fascinating.

    And then! He turned his head, revealing a large and partly concealed bald spot. The monument to vainglory and fixative resins. The Potemkin Coiffure.

    The ironic comb-over.

    It had to be ironic, right? The mustache certainly was. Ironic style kinda requires a gestalt in order to “succeed.”

    I googled “ironic comb-over” to see if this was, in fact, some fad you’d need a B62 bus to know about, but came up with nothin’. I found a thread from 2005 over at ilXor that did neither confirmed nor denied. The earliest reference I found was in a 1998 Esquire. 

    Maybe later I’ll look on Lexis Nexis, when I’m really trying to procrastinate. But I’ve devoted about ten times more effort and thought than this merits. I know I should live and let live but whatever. I judge you, ironic combover dude. You are too old to still be this amused by yourself.

    *Background for those of you under 35: In the early 90s, Jim and Debbie Goad produced four brilliantly offensive issues of a zine called Answer Me. It was, basically, the progenitor of shit like Vice magazine and Sarah Silverman. And I admired them because they seemed so perfectly united in their misanthropy, two misfits who found each other, and also because they used perfect grammar. And then awhile later, they divorced, and Jim Goad somehow justified beating Debbie, a woman with terminal ovarian cancer, btw, by saying that he just loved her too darn much. Even though she was, according to him, so retarded that he was actually the one who wrote all of her zine articles. And now I realize that he’s just a conservative, racist, misogynist piece of shit masquerading as a prankster-provocateur. (Not unlike Boyd Rice, but I digress…)

Notes