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Simon & Schuster
January 2009
On Sale: January 13, 2009
144 pages
ISBN: 1416599452
EAN: 9781416599456
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
What is snark? You recognize it when you see it -- a tone of
teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that
is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening
to take over how Americans converse with each other and what
they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone's
mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness. In this
sharp and witty polemic, New Yorker critic and
bestselling author David Denby takes on the snarkers, naming
the nine principles of snark -- the standard techniques its
practitioners use to poison their arrows. Snarkers like to
think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing
the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad
feeling but little laughter. In this highly entertaining
essay, Denby traces the history of snark through the ages,
starting with its invention as personal insult in the
drinking clubs of ancient Athens, tracking its development
all the way to the age of the Internet, where it has become
the sole purpose and style of many media, political, and
celebrity Web sites. Snark releases the anguish of the
dispossessed, envious, and frightened; it flows when a dying
class of the powerful struggles to keep the barbarians
outside the gates, or, alternately, when those outsiders
want to take over the halls of the powerful and expel the
office-holders. Snark was behind the London-based magazine
Private Eye, launched amid the dying embers of the British
empire in 1961; it was also central to the career-hungry,
New York-based magazine Spy. It has flourished over the
years in the works of everyone from the startling Roman poet
Juvenal to Alexander Pope to Tom Wolfe to a million
commenters snarling at other people behind handles. Thanks
to the grand dame of snark, it has a prominent place twice a
week on the opinion page of the New York
Times. Denby has fun snarking the snarkers, expelling
the bums and promoting the true wits, but he is also making
a serious point: the Internet has put snark on steroids. In
politics, snark means the lowest, most insinuating and
insulting side can win. For the young, a savage piece of
gossip could ruin a reputation and possibly a future career.
And for all of us, snark just sucks the humor out of life.
Denby defends the right of any of us to be cruel, but shows
us how the real pros pull it off. Snark, he says, is for the
amateurs.
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