I'm not in the habit of posting every Wallace reference here any more (those are more likely to be found in my twitter feed) but because The Saturday Paper is my current non-digital Saturday read I'll make an exception.
From Brigid Delaney's (@BrigidWD),The Blunting of the Snark:
[...]
NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said Fallon’s brand of “optimistic, enthusiastic, not snarky” comedy is “exactly what America was looking for”.According to Forbes, “Burke’s comments speak to the rise of likeability, which has in recent years become a basic standard for branding of all kinds. Whether it’s selling a show or a product, a positive tone has become the must-have quality needed to win over younger audiences.”
The late American writer David Foster Wallace, who made his own journey from snark to sincerity, predicted this trend in the early 1990s: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in US life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”
And eschewing it they are.
[...]
Continue reading,The Blunting of the Snark.
[From E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, in the Review of Contemporary Fiction Summer 1993 and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.]
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