Kaufman, a lecturer in American Studies at a university in England, has written an entire book predicated on a stray remark of Kurt Vonnegut, that "American humorists or satirists or whatever you wish to call them, those who choose to laugh rather than weep about demoralizing information, become intolerably unfunny pessimists if they live past a certain age." Never mind that some of the subjects of the book, like stand-ups Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, didn't exactly make it to "a certain age," or that others, like Herman Melville and Sinclair Lewis, were always more pessimistic than humorous: An academic book that tells its readers that all irony, even its highest literary manifestations, is a priori doomed, is bound to please a lot of people who would rather social critics like Lenny Bruce and Sinclair Lewis never even went through the laughing-rather-than-weeping phase, much less the intolerably pessimistic one.

"Irony fatigue," a phrase Kaufman coined looking for what American humorist/pessimist Fran Lebowitz described as "undue fanfare," is a concept whose time has come. Even as knowing a filmmaker as John Waters, never exactly Frank Capra, ends his latest film Pecker with a toast to the end of irony. We've come a long way from what Spy magazine in the '80s labeled "the irony epidemic." The Irony Backlash has set in. Everyone is tired of the trickled-down and facile irony that pretty much defines the media sensibility of recent years; now, a professor gives the people who never liked any kind of irony, facile or otherwise, the chance to declare it self-destructive and unproductive. Unfunniness and optimism, freed from their shackles, can reign in the land once more, and shine on us even at midnight. I feel warmer already.

Kaufman doesn't differentiate between kinds of irony, and he takes every statement from his subjects at face value: Just because Mark Twain wrote in a letter "A man can't write successful satire unless he be in a calm judicial humorŠ I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with ANYthing to satirize it; no, I want to stand up before it and curse it, and foam at the mouth--to take a club and pound it to rags and pulp," doesn't mean he still didn't write successful satire or wasn't funny when he was angry. Nor does it prove Kaufman's premise, that once an American writer or monologist gets serious, the comic in him dies. What Kaufman does show is that when men like Twain and Bruce became increasingly conscious socially, they were punished for it. He seems to blame them for the woes they found as a result. Why couldn't Prozac have been invented earlier, he seems to ask. Then Twain never would've written his Letters from the Earth, and Lenny Bruce would still be alive. In fact, he'd probably be playing the grumpy coffee-shop owner on Friends.

That the humor and the ill-humor of his subjects are indissolubly linked doesn't occur to Kaufman. That the two things were bound to fluctuate as his subjects got more freedom in their careers escapes him, too. That pessimism could take over once a writer or comedian is beyond caring what people think of him, a concept central to American life--whether one works in literature or showbiz or in an office or factory, seems to Kaufman to prove something. The well-known fact that the clown is sad comes to him as a revelation.

The Comedian as Confidence Man is plagued with contradictions and haunted by the thought that art isn't enough. Ultimately, for Kaufman, unseriousness just isn't serious enough, but neither is seriousness unserious enough. One wonders what he wants, not just from Kurt Vonnegut and Ben Franklin, but from art and life. This is the same false problem American humorist Woody Allen has made a career out of wringing his hands over. Suspiciously, the man who could be an icon of irony fatigue is not even mentioned in Kaufman's study.

That's because Kaufman's grasp on American culture is slippery. Trying to show he's hip, at one point he groups Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis together as bop musicians and says that '50s America didn't dig their music, with its "incomprehensible slitherings." Bop? Incomprehensible slitherings? Lester Young? In the same sentence, he holds up Lawrence Welk and Nelson Riddle as avatars of square, evidently unaware of Riddle's pedigree with Sinatra; in the same paragraph he'd just thrown Sinatra a bone by writing that Frank was hip enough to have Slim Gaillard on his prewar radio show. Nor do I trust a book that starts off with a dubious attribution in its epigraphs. Kaufman calls the 1929 Gary Cooper western The Virginian "Lewis Lighton's film," attributing it to one of its producers, not its director, Victor Fleming. (Lighton did write a 1923 screen-version of the novel.) Fleming's not exactly obscure, being the credited director of both The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. That an academic writing in 1997 can attribute a film to a producer rather than its director just shows that, in some quarters at least, certain battles will never be won. Kaufman misquotes the line in the film he's so interested in (the book coyly ends with a reference to it), which doesn't help matters. When an academic makes mistakes like these, it casts doubt not just on his research and his premise, but on his sensibility, too. But maybe my sensibility is turning into anger, like Twain and company's. In that case, sure, Pres played bop and the guy responsible for The Virginian is Lewis Lighton--which Lighton spelled "Louis." (Note to Wayne State University Press: they're called fact-checkers.)

Kaufman, quoting Vonnegut, says that comedians are obliged to ameliorate or conceal things that would be troubling to their audiences. I question whether this has ever been true, and whether any truly interesting comedy has ever resulted from anyone laboring under that idea. Certainly Vonnegut's work has never ameliorated much. It may be difficult for Vonnegut or anybody else to handle the contradictory natures of their art and of their personalities, but they do; it's the audience who can't take it. Humor is mostly angry, pessimistic, outraged, and critical, even if it hides these attitudes. And unlike this book, irony itself can be both contradictory and successful.

How can anyone not notice that comedy today is a category of worthlessness? As we say around the Hermenaut office, humor is the lowest form of humor. This is true in two ways: Humor divorced from criticism barely amuses, and things that are simply funny and nothing else concern no one. If The Comedian as Confidence Man does anything, it apologizes for those truths. If the people Kaufman calls "practitioners" weren't aggrieved and in pain in the first place, chances are they never would've felt called upon to comment humorously on the passing scene, to write it down, to get on stage. In trying to pinpoint irony fatigue, yet another pseudo-concept we'll all have to suffer now, Kaufman is forced to do unspeakable things like hold up Garrison Keillor as an ideal. He also quotes Mark Twain: "There is no humor in heaven." Sure, but I bet you can get The Prairie Home Companion.