Wit. Badinage. Banter. No one expects humor on tests like SAT, AP Literature, or AP Language and Composition because they are big serious life-determining events. Students forget--if they ever knew--that the literature passages were originally written to entertain. Writing a good book is as much about the words one uses as it is about the actions those words describe, but teens who only read for the action often miss the wordplay that makes those books ironic--and funny.
Reading comprehension passages on tests are generally not not action-packed. Instead, they tend to include long descriptions that include imagery or emotional nuance that the reader is expected to pick up on. When that nuance is ironically intended or critical of a character, it may fly under the radar of students who expect that what they read will be straightforward and serious.
And therein lies the rub. When Bilbo Baggins tells the crowd assembled at his birthday party,
“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve,” silence ensues because everyone needs a moment to work out what he said.
Saki (aka H. H. Munro) is known for his ease with wordplay, as in a description of someone as “one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.” As in Shakespeare’s better-known insult, “I do desire we be better strangers,” the speaker’s true meaning is unclear until the end of the sentence, and the polite wording of the rest of the sentence makes the insult both acceptable and entertaining.
In literary parlance, these understatements are known as litotes, expressions in which a positive idea is expressed by the negative of its opposite: “You’re not wrong” instead of “You’re right.” Litotes are often concealed in long sentences that impatient or inattentive readers might call flowery or wordy; if you miss them, the joke’s on you. For example, Jane Austen writes in Pride and Prejudice that “[w]hen Mr. Collins said any thing of which his wife might reasonably be ashamed, which certainly was not unseldom, she involuntarily turned her eye on Charlotte.” “Seldom” means “not often,” so “unseldom” means “often.” In other words, Mr. Collins frequently says things that embarrass his wife, and now we readers are in on the joke.
Another example of irony comes from Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum: “Agnes looked hard at the pixie. On a scale of ethereal from one to ten he looked as if he was on some other scale, probably one buried deep in ocean sludge.” Here, Pratchett’s use of familiar scale imagery is sabotaged by the scale’s hypothetical location. Similarly, Ernest Hemingway takes a sweep at the expatriate community in Paris, when he says, "The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles on that section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotonde." It’s not hard to work out the metaphor; the danger lies in not noticing it’s there.
Ironic wordplay appears even in texts that are meant to be taken seriously, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Prudence,” which has often been used for SAT Reading. Emerson writes that he has “no skill to make money spend well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers that I must have some other garden.” I’ve taught this passage dozens of times, and students almost never understand that Emerson is saying that his “garden” is so weedy and unproductive that it looks nothing like a garden. Even though Emerson’s sentence does to gardens what Pratchett’s sentence does to scales, students are less likely to notice it because it appears in an essay that purports to be serious.
Irony relies on subtle humor to make its points. So, remind your students that those dense-looking sentences may conceal some of the smartest, funniest writing in English!
Elizabeth Breau, Ph.D., is a private English tutor and the author of History According to SAT: A Content Guide to SAT Reading and Writing. Her website is historyaccordingtosat.com. She can be reached at elizabeth.breau@gmail.com.
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