Up to interpretation - Shawn Loughlin editorial

As part of a valiant effort to teach our daughter manners, which, frankly, is going quite well, I haven’t been able to help realizing how thoroughly sarcasm has infiltrated our society, at least for people of my generation and beyond.

 

There are the basics, of course, like adding a simple “please” when asking for something and then saying “thank you” when you receive whatever it was you were asking for. Where things have - at least to my 40-year-old ears - gone a bit sideways is when we ask Tallulah to be polite when she doesn’t want something. So, if she doesn’t want to wear a particular outfit or eat something we’re trying to feed her, she’ll respond with a “no thanks, Daddy.” Some of these are normal-sounding enough, like, say, if we ask her if she wants to go play downstairs and she doesn’t want to. But, then there are other times when she pretty much has to do something and she’ll hit me with the “no thanks, Daddy.” 

 

A good example of this is going to bed. So, we’ll tell her that it’s time to start her (lengthy) bedtime routine and she’ll just scuttle off and play some more, shouting a “no thanks” as she disappears around a corner. 

 

It’s hard to suppress a chuckle when she gives us one of those. It kind of feels like checking out at a takeaway restaurant, taking your food, being told how much you owe and then gleefully skipping back to your car with your food telling the cashier “no thanks” to his request for his money.

 

Tallulah saying “no thanks” is a perfectly reasonable response to most things but, this is where I think I’ve been spoiled by sarcasm.

 

I grew up in the heyday of sarcasm. If you Google any list of the most sarcastic characters in movies or television of the last few decades (as I did to write this column) one of the top results will always be Matthew Perry’s Chandler Bing on Friends, a show that is baked into the lives of many people my age and younger. 

 

For people a bit younger than I am, Friends is the show for them. It’s the foundational sitcom upon which many of them have built their senses of humour. For me and many from my generation, that show is Seinfeld, but somewhere along the way that torch was passed, for better or worse, to Friends.

 

For those of us whose brains are hardwired to assume someone is being sarcastic first and then pivoting to our second option of sincerity (sage advice from an old baseball coach who always told us, when hitting, to expect a fastball and adjust to a curveball), a “no thanks” from your child when you’re trying to get something, for lack of a better term, mandatory accomplished can’t help but feel like a dig. (“She’s sticking it to me,” as Seinfeld’s George Costanza would say.)

 

Somewhere along the way, however, those lovable, know-it-alls lost their charm. Listening to a movie podcast recently, the hosts talked about Chevy Chase, a runaway train of talent for a certain generation that cherished his particular brand of smarm, but that fell out of favour with subsequent generations, leaving him as a bit of a man without a country forced to reinvent himself.

 

Now, it sounds like Chase, while I love him, didn’t just necessarily play the “everyone-has-one-hole” on screens, but fulfilled that role in real life more than a few times, which may have had something to do with it, but he taught a lot of us about humour. 

 

Tallulah thinks she’s being polite and I think she’s being funny. I guess it’s just the beginning for this brand of misunderstandings.