Can we talk about irony for a second?

Yeah, I know: this is an Overthinking Lost post.  We should be talking about Egyptian mythology, or Jungian psychology, or, I dunno… Jesus?  But today I’d like to take off my former-English-major hat, if only for a moment, and replace it with my writer hat.  Because, damn, people.  That was a well-written episode.*

Here at Overthinking It, we’ve been talking about a disturbing trend in advertising for several years. We saw several (nine, to be exact) instances of this in last Saturday’s Super Bowl. Here’s an example:

Advertiser: Doritos

Message: “Eating Doritos will get you shocked by a dog.”

Huh? Why is this a good thing? How is this supposed to sell Doritos? Well, we’re not really sure, but we’ve coined a phrase that aptly describes this perplexing phenomenon:

“Bad Things Happen To You When You Use Our Product.”

Let’s explore this trend further with some more examples.

VerhOeverthinking It week may be over, but a lot of the analysis we did on the work of filmmaker Paul Verhoeven carries over into other areas of the popular culture, such as music. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Steel Panther, the Starship Troopers of Heavy Metal.

1985 called. It wants its...everything...back.

Overthinking Cowboy Bebop is on hiatus due to VerhOeverthinking It Week.  Don’t worry, it’ll be back soon!

Back in the days when I was a teenager, before I was a hipster and before I had a website, I used to divide movies by their goodness into two basic categories.

Judgements are subjective. If you loved Night at the Museum 2, you are entitled... to... your... Aghk! I can't say it!

This was simple and accurate, and served me well for many years.  But then I went off to college, where I contracted that most pervasive and untreatable of viral infections:  irony.  (And also plantar warts.  Kids! Wear flip-flops in the shower every time!)  Hardly a week went by in college where I didn’t get together with one group of friends or another to watch a terrible movie for the sole purpose of mocking it.  This confounded my system:  these movies were terrible, obviously, and yet they made me feel good.  Clearly I needed a new category:  the good-bad movie.  (I am not the first one to think of this, although I probably thought that I was at the time.  College students are like that.)  And having just taken Psych 101, I made up a new table which divided the movies that made me feel good into three crudely Freudian categories.

I’ve been playing a lot of Super Smash Brothers: Brawl lately, and I played Super Smash Brothers Melee religiously for years (at least, wow six or seven years by now).

Religiously, hm?

It's-a me! Pentecost!

At the heart of Super Smash Brothers is solid gameplay, but on the surface is misplaced familiarity. Take something that doesn’t belong in a fighting game, put it in a fighting game, and suddenly there are all sorts of unintended joys. It took everybody a while to warm up to the Tekken guys (and I, frankly, still haven’t), but there’s a sincere pleasure to playing with these familiar characters as they fight. It’s the sort of fantasy that’s always part of the artistic imagination. It worked for tennis, it worked for golf, it worked for paper, it worked for karts — when you shoehorn in Nintendo characters, the game becomes more familiar, more interesting and more fun.

Shoehorning, hm?

More fun, hm?

What follows is an experiment . . .  can the Smash Brothers principle make anything fun? How much of the original shines through, and how much is just nonsense? Can it spice up something that’s solid at its core, but could definitely gain something from being more familiar, more interesting and more fun . . .

. . . like the King James Bible?

Stringer Bell is tired of Alanis Morissette jokes, and so are we.

In 2003, I wrote the Urban Dictionary definition of Morissettian Irony. In the song “Ironic,” Alanismentions a bunch of things that aren’t really ironic, they’re just unfortunate in precisely the way you would expect. I don’t want to talk about the song specifically right now. The song is pretty kicked and tired at this point. We’ve all heard jokes and arguments along those lines more times than we can count.

I want to talk about two things that happened this week, and a new (old) way to talk about non-ironic situations that still quizzical moments, where you know a few meanings that relate to each other are bumping together.

Stringer Bell on The Office, after the jump —

Twenty Four is in full swing (I’ve spelled out the number to comply with Overthinking It’s copious style guidelines), which means it’s time for the annual spring tradition – going rogue.

For the uninitiated, “going rogue” is the process by which defense, intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement professionals begin a shift of active duty. It is the third step in the standard U.S. government four-step defense, intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement operating procedure (or S.U.S. FSICCLEO).

What is S.U.S. FSICCLEO, and what does it tell us about what we think about order?

The writer of Man of La Mancha passed away on December 21. However, in accordance with his wishes, his wife didn’t let anyone know until after Christmas, “so as not to spoil anyone’s holiday.”

A little TOO quixotic. And yeah, I really do think.

(By the way, read to the bottom of the article. Turns out before he was a writer, he was a hobo. Yes: a hobo.)

[The "Musical Talmud" is our ongoing series that finds the true meaning behind pop music lyrics.]

Christmas Talmud? Oy vey. That’s our awkward way of wishing you a Happy Overthinking It Holiday Season. Let’s take a deeper look at John Lennon’s protest/ Christmas song, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” Since the meaning behind this song is already well known–it’s a protest against the Vietnam War–I’m going to use this as an opportunity to examine this song as an example of “earony.”

This is no longer provocative.

and, more importantly, with its world dwelling in a cultural space between irrelevance and exhaustion, I think it’s about time that we, perhaps a year or two late, declare that hipsterism is over.

And I don’t mean “so over” over, using an epistemology incapable of refuting itself. I mean over like when your mom has come over to your friend’s house and you’re six and it’s been time to go for ten minutes and she’s starting to get pissed. “It’s over, Peter, get in the car,” over.

And as with the fall of all great empires, that makes this time for armchair anthropologists to pick apart its corpse. Or, if we’re feeling less like vultures or consider trucker hats less than Imperial — make fun of its former halfhearted iconoclasm. Resistance is, after all, futile.

My take on why the reason you like your Thundercats shirt now is fundamentally different from why you liked your Thundercats shirt in 2002, plus why ‘90s techno will never die, after the jump —