Snark
By David Denby
Picador £9.99, 144 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.99

Something is seriously wrong with the way we insult each other, says David Denby in this sprightly polemical essay.

There was a time when abuse was performed with style, wit and elegance; and it came from a clear moral stance. The ancient Greeks raised it to an art form: it had a formal structure and it took risks by offending the powerful. Jonathan Swift’s savagely ironic A Modest Proposal, which urged that the Irish poor should sell their children to the rich as food, was a masterpiece of outrage and black humour.

But “snark” – the term is borrowed from Lewis Carroll – is something different. Denby refers to a tone of voice, which has spread far and wide thanks to new media technologies, that is content to spread casual calumnies without regard to whether they possess any sense of.

Snark is “free-floating contempt in a void”: it is the unchecked innuendo that can end a career, or the clumsy and overblown destruction of easy targets. Its purveyor-in-chief is the anonymous internet blogger, who has nothing positive to contribute to civic discourse other than “low, ragging insult with a little curlicue of knowingess”.

Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker, makes his case with wit – vital to avoid the obvious charge of humourlessness. He is at pains to rebut the accusation. To take a stand against snark is not to submit to self-importance and excessive earnestness; it is merely to call for greater care in the choosing of victims and the crafting of jokes.

As he acknowledges, he treads a thin line. Some satire is closely related to gratuitous offence. But Denby mostly makes his case: he brings the shrewd critical eye of an outsider, for example, to his discussion of Private Eye, a magazine that brilliantly spoofs the oddities of British life but that has become too promiscuous in its appetite for ridicule, exposing its own prejudices.

He is equally perceptive on the limitations of Tom Wolfe’s brilliantly written but ill-judged attacks on “radical chic” in the 1970s, which succumbed to cheap jibes at the expense of “the satirist’s sharp, outraged, correcting desire for a better world”.

Denby stresses that the stakes of his discussion are forbiddingly high. He recounts some of the snark that surrounded the campaign of Barack Obama: could America’s potentially most able president for decades have been brought down by shallow cynicism, even before he started?

The author attacks the cult of internet journalism and blogging in particular. This, too, often hides behind its lack of resources – “we don’t have time to check all our sources properly” – while at the same time it claims that it does better than mainstream journalism in ferreting out the truth. It can’t work both ways, says Denby.

Sad to report, but snark is also prevalent in British journalism, which seems to prize sarcasm and faux-philistinism far above the intelligent handling of complex issues. In that regard, it is surely colluding with its own downfall. Just how funny is that?

Peter Aspden is the FT’s arts writer