Navigating the Sar-Chasm

Photo by Hubert Buratynski on Unsplash

During my senior year of college, I attended a capping ceremony. A group of my friends had decorated a graduation cap, and at the end of the ceremony, one of them—who was sitting behind me—put the cap on my head. I hadn’t seen it until then, as it was meant to be a surprise.

When I finally took it off to look at it, I saw all the decorations that had been affixed to it. One of them was a meme image of Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory saying, “Was that…sarcasm?”

There’s a good reason this image was on my cap. I’ve been known for much of my life as someone who doesn’t understand sarcasm. That’s not completely true, but it often seems like it is because I don’t respond to sarcastic jokes and tones of voice the same way others do.

In college, I was around a decent number of sarcastic people. I earned the occasional nickname “Sheldon”, since Sheldon Cooper is a genius scientist who doesn’t understand many basic social cues, particularly the sarcastic comments his friends make about his often-annoying antics.

My abnormal reaction to sarcasm comes from being raised in a non-sarcastic home in which we directly said the things we meant and made wordplay jokes. I’m not incapable of understanding sarcasm, but I never learned how to respond to it like most other people do. There are, of course, times when I don’t realize someone is being sarcastic with me. If I can’t tell, I will inevitably respond to their joke as if they’re not joking.

I’m generally not fond of sarcasm for one simple reason: whenever I hear someone act or speak sarcastically, I see right through it. I see the negativity rather than the joke.

I could be wrong, but the way I’ve always understood it, sarcasm is a way to hide frustration, annoyance, or bitterness with humor. Someone will use a mild or veiled insult or say a deliberately opposite statement to what has already been said, as if the person they’re speaking to is slow to understand. I know sarcasm can be more than just that, but this is often the way I’ve experienced it directed at me.

As a result, sarcasm has almost always made me feel like someone has something against me or thinks themselves superior to me. I always wonder, “What if they actually mean that insulting thing they just said or implied, and they’re using a social device to pretend they aren’t being mean?”

I know some people who are sarcastic and genuinely don’t mean (or don’t think they mean) the things they say. But I’ve known others who definitely did. And I’ve had enough experience with people who use sarcasm to veil a mean-spirited remark that I don’t feel like “playing the game” most of the time.

I can probably count on one hand the number of people I know whose sarcasm I don’t mind and can actually somewhat play along with. That’s because I know their background and that they actually care about me and don’t wish to insult me. It still baffles me, though, that some people can communicate with each other using mock-negativity.

So where does that put me?

Well, I will probably always and forever be the guy who doesn’t use sarcasm and doesn’t respond to it the way he’s meant to. And I don’t intend to change that.

I usually respond literally to sarcasm by defending myself or deflecting the remark. It’s not just because I don’t always detect it. It’s also because I don’t want to encourage people to continue being sarcastic with me. Call me sensitive, but it has almost always felt at least a tad hurtful, and I believe words should build up, not tear down, no matter the intention behind them.

In my work with recovery ministry, there’s a lesson in the program that takes sarcastic joking into consideration and talks about it being a practice that can create distance between people.

A sar-chasm, if you’ll pardon my pun.

I’ve never really had to deal with this particular lesson in my own spiritual journey, but I’ve heard people admit to having hurt people with sarcastic words and tones of voices.

I don’t want to be someone who deliberately uses words and tones of voice that could hurt someone else, and I want people to call me out whenever I do. It makes me wonder, though: would the world be a kinder place if more people said what they mean and thought twice about making potentially hurtful jokes?