When as a young man I went to live among the English for some years, I was puzzled by many things that their language, ostensibly my own, habitually expressed using words that I could understand but so arranged that I couldn’t understand them. Not the least of these enigmatical expressions, to my American ears, was “self-parody.” People would apply the expression to those of whom they were inclined to be critical, so I knew that the expression was also critical. But I still couldn’t quite see how it was critical. How could somebody be a parody of himself? It was only when my ear became further attuned to the British habit of ironical discourse that I began to understand how there is always a gap of some size, large or small, between the way people see themselves and the way they are seen by others—that gap which satire is perpetually being invited to fill—and that this gap, beyond a certain point of self-absorption, would inevitably become obvious to pretty much everyone but the self-absorbed ones themselves.

Irony’s sine qua non, however, is a culturally (and linguistically) shared sense of reality—that reality against which self-importance and self-deception can be measured and found wanting. Without it, irony and the ironical temperament must decline and fall, and that is, in fact, what we see happening today, even in Britain. How else to explain the fact that, so far at least, none of the parliamentary posturers over Brexit has yet