Sarcasm

[Sacks]

Does anyone remember when sarcasm was supposed to be a subtle ironic remark without all this eye rolling and stupid-voice stuff? Are high schoolers responsible for this? Is it because everyone needs to be told when to laugh at something?

I was trying to think back to cartoons that may have caused kids to grow up with this concept. All I could think of was Daria and the sarcasm in that show was very subtle and the other characters in the show rarely caught on to it. Then I thought about those times when the joke is that someone is really bad at detecting sarcasm/trickery and assumes someone is being sarcastic/tricking them, only to start using a huffy voice to say something like "SURE AND WHEN I OPEN THIS DOOR THERE WILL BE X" and sure enough when they open the door there is X and it's a scary monster/bear/cop/bad thing and ha ha cut and print lets go home. Did this happen so much that people began to think that this is what sarcasm is about?

I guess maybe I'm looking to much into this and things just came to be this way because most people are not very clever and don't have very good timing. If enough people do bad sarcasm for long enough more people catch on to that and everyone assumes that is what it is about.