Victor Shenderovich. Short praise of irony

COLTA. RU asked Viktor Shenderovich to write an educational program about irony, and received a praise and, in essence, a poem.

Life is beautiful and disgusting.

In youth, it seems that you go to a restaurant where you choose everything to your liking - but you get to a comprehensive lunch.

Do you want independence? Great, but this is the first. And on the second, brother, get a dry torture of that poverty, which always at first accompanies independence, and with a side dish of humiliation that accompany poverty ...

Do you want? Please, here you have the "Complex number two"! Warm heart soup - enter, membership and prosper - but already on the second, not blame, the hard piece of lack of freedom with a side dish from the humiliation that already concomiting non -freedom will stand across the throat.

There is a third “complex” in this dining room, and one hundred and fourth, and two hundred and the fifth: for Donjuans and Karenins, for sinful and righteous, for risky and cautious, for misanthropes and altruists, for smart and not very ...

But not a single custom dish!

Something is attached to everyone that a person with great hunting would refuse-but then the plates are clean. These are the rules of the institution.

By the end of the meal, many are sick.

Instead of Festal, God sent us the ability to irony - and self -irony as its moral peak!

So far, a person has the strength to grin - over himself and his own menu, over his people, his superiors and his universe - you can still live in this canteen.

And on both sides of the irony, mental territories are extended, poorly adapted for human existence.

On the right, behind the barbed wire of fundamentalism, lies what is called “animal seriousness” in the theater: zero reflection, the inability to look at the world with a “obscured” look. Apologies and the Philippics reign there, there is only white or black, “long live” or “Down with”. It grows there, and grows almost always to the blood.

And on the other side of the irony, the meaningless newfangled “Stebalovo”, not remembering kinship and does not distinguish the top and bottom, walks.

This is often confused with irony, but confused completely in vain ...

The irony is firmly committed to the human coordinate system: its grin emphasizes the imperfection of the world, but does not question the need to wash his hands before eating, telling the truth, protecting the weak ...

A grin that denies this coordinate system is already a grin of a cynic. And cynicism is a sour irony; This vinegar goes well for a drip for seasoning, but drink it - you will burn a gut ...

Let us leave Stebalovo to those who did not read Swift and Gogol, and cynicism - to those who never believed in anything, or lost to complete blackness, or got to the loss of coordinates - and we themselves turn to sober, clear irony.

The daughter of wisdom and despair, she is the best party for a decent person! Without it, it would not make a big point without it and, I would not have a big point: you can crap on everything around.

As well as proud of yourself, however.

And only a self -ironic person has a chance to straighten up - and become at least a little higher than himself yesterday.

“I like an ironic person -
He, in essence, is a heroic person ... "