Sicklical Chuckling

Twice upon a time, King's College Cambridge was a free radical. It slept with all the former enemies in quick succession and, in return for the pleasure, it offered access to its bookshelf. Women, state-school flotsam, and - last but not least - communists. Commies stretched as far as the eye could see, columns of revolution that not only did not keep off the grass: they swathed it in red. The sandstone's blush was visible from the moon.

The roseate tinge still seeps into the glasses current King's students look through to connect with their chronically mutinous predecessors. And let it be known from the start: I am one of those students. For the postmodern child, the child of the children of 1968, it's hard to resist the sense of belatedness that hits at the point just after smashing your ipod in frustration at its poor performance and visualising Steve Jobs buried alive in a tomb of malfunctioning tablets. Calm returns, and you hollow out the middle class question: is this it? Did we sell the revolution for cul-de-sac advancements in personal audio?

My cosy position of ironic detachment was threatened a few weeks ago when a revolutionary measure was proposed. On the wall of the King's college bar - in the same shot as the pool table, from whichever angle it's composed - is a sacred item: a painting of the once Soviet flag, yellow hammer and sickle on red background. Prostrate yourselves, faithful. But apparently not everyone is a believer. For a humble suggestion was made: take the thing down. The apocrypha go that a student was leading his/her Russian friend through the bar for the first time, proudly showing off their share of the Cambridge thesaurus. Friend, on catching sight of the painting, immediately broke down in tears; such was the enduring keenness of the wound inflicted by the regime, a painted reproduction of the flag of which adorned the wall of our drinking den. This is where a better person/more deceptive writer would advertise their initial response of sympathy. This is where I don't do that. My knee-jerk (my only knee-jerk?) was to fend it off with ridicule. As a kid, I was traumatised by a Spartan dentist who drilled my teeth and gums into a ground powder of enamel and flesh. But I don't go spluttering every time I see a portrait of a dentist. Indeed, I welcome any attempt to artistically represent this most neglected of subjects. Personal grievances must be suppressed for the art. All for the art. Especially when the genre is barely teething.

It's of course in the nature of a middle-class beneficiary without significant experience of loss or suffering to be dismissive, if not downright flippant, about that of others. Some of the best (or my favourite - what does that say?) comedy emerges from this padded room of middle-class insulation. The problem is that the flippancy never seems to matter because we comfortably classed kids travel in packs. We watch the two-minute guardian wrap on the day's tragedy, donate if they're lucky - and we're done. We make appropriate condemnations for the appropriate time (prescription of mourning periods has always been a funny feature of civilisation), and then we make jokes. None of your friends will pull you up on that slightly-too-soon Haiti crack, and if they do, well, retreat: it was just a joke. With the advent of internet anonymity, it's astounding how small the gap between disaster and japery has become. So narrow that we could go down in history as the generation in which laughter and slaughter became contemporaneous.

The reason I emphasise the shelter of 'just a joke' is that I was surprised - not because it was particularly surprising, but because I'm particularly easily surprised - to find that very tack taken by many of the 'reasonable' students in the college. When the discussion got going on the issue of whether to remove the flag altogether, replace/supplement it with something else, or keep it as is and was (discussion that flared for days, on and off line), I think it would be fair to say that the majority of people in favour of retaining the flag were not rabid reds. They were people that saw a kind of postmodern, self-conscious irony in the exhibition of a gilt-framed communist flag in a space whose very stones were consecrated to unequal distribution of wealth. Not to mention the fact that a symbol of honest manual labour looked out upon a scene of leisure at best, luxuriant over-indulgence at worst. So most 'keepers' saw the joke, or a joke. And I realised what awesome power the definite article has, what an immense social force a joke can be, and what irony in an ironic age can do to really get things done (or prevent them from being done). In-groups are constituted through - among other things - getting the joke. The childhood paranoia about exclusion due to not getting it, getting it too late, or getting it only to realise you don't have it, but it's on you instead - the anxiety round the joke is available for funerals and nightmares. Now I'm just parodying Freud. Even though I haven't read Freud. Geez, don't you get it?

The power became noticeable because I felt it acting on me. Before this issue arose, I'd never thought of the painting as more than a quirky feature whose presence made us feel better about apathy. Perhaps I intuited that there was something fishily ironic going on here - but I didn't feel further brain investment necessary. When the ironic campaigners set off, however, I immediately jumped on board. Pfft. Yeah. Of course it's ironic. Isn't it obvious? Whether you're for or against, if you don't find this whole situation funny, you're not reading it properly. Lighten up, square. No one likes a square. Round up and fit in our nice ironic hole, why don't ya?

Don't get me wrong. We're living in the ironic age - that's post-iron age if you're talking archaeologically - and I'm an ironic child. But the guilty problem I grapple with every day, in life and work (Juvenal is just joking when he's all misogynistic, right?), is that irony is impossible to argue with. The ironists have won. A jokey interpretation will always trump a serious interpretation because it ranks higher on the 'get it' meter: to see irony is a distinguishing marker of sophistication and intelligence. It's the knowing glance between artist and 'responder', the contract that wins the critical points. It connects people that get it. And call me elitist - thanks, I've heard you, now you can stop - but I can't help wanting to be part of the it-crowd. I shuffle over to the wry smiles almost spontaneously. I want to be close to the distance of the laugh. I can't bring myself to risk sincerity.

The votes were counted and the flag remains. My devout socialist friend was delivered the results through an i-Phone. He sprang up and began to hug members of his own it-crowd: 'We won! We won!' I didn't have the heart to tell him it was an ironist victory. That would have been far too serious indeed.