In a 1993 essay on television and U.S. fiction, David Foster Wallace suggested that irony means always having to undercut what you say by some acknowledgement that you don’t really mean what you say: “the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expectations of value, emotion, or vulnerability” (63).

-- Nicholas Rombes at Mythic Cinema and its Discontents via, of course, Digital poetics.