How has the ubiquity of television impacted American culture? How does television function as a medium? Is the prevalence of irony and postmodernism on television healthy for society? These are questions American writer David Foster Wallace aims to answer in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” The essay was originally written in 1990 and published in the journal The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, but the piece ultimately found a home in Wallace’s 1997 book of essays entitled A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. A Supposedly Fun Thing was met with critical acclaim and commercial success; Slate named A Supposedly Fun Thing one of the fifty greatest non-fiction works of the past twenty-five years and The New York Times called Wallace "one of his generation's pre-eminent talents” (Kois & Miller and Wallace). Seen as a manifesto for Wallace’s generation of fiction writers, “E Unibus Pluram” continues to be one of his most influential works (Giles 328). However, over thirty years have passed since the essay was originally written, and culture and television have continued to evolved. Do Wallace’s assertions about irony still hold up to the current state of television? I aim to answer that question in this paper. To that end, this paper will accomplish two things. First, I recount the argument about irony Wallace presents in “E Unibus Pluram.” Second, I assess the validity of Wallace’s claim by placing the argument in conversation with the 2009 television sitcom Community. In doing so, I argue that irony and sincerity are not only not incompatible — as Wallace claims — but the two constructs can be mutually beneficial; that is to say, one can use irony as an effective vehicle for sincerity.

David Foster Wallace’s generation was the first generation to have grown up not knowing what life was like without the television being commonplace in American households (Wallace 78). When “E Unibus Pluram” was written, Americans were watching an average of six hours of television every day (Wallace 58). America was obsessed with television as a medium of entertainment. Because of television’s prevalence, Wallace found it important to assess the impact television’s programming had on American culture.

Postmodernism was the prevailing intellectual and artistic movement of the 1990s, and television was no exception to its pervasiveness (Wallace 97). Indeed, much of Wallace’s criticism of television programming centered on its use of postmodern devices such as cynicism, self-referentiality, and irreverence. The postmodern literary device at the center of Wallace’s criticism was irony; Wallace claims, “television was practically made [sic] for irony,”  and “I’m going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture” (Wallace 71, 83). Evolving past the overtly sentimental television shows which characterized the 1970s and 1980s — such as The Brady Bunch, The Facts of Life, and Three's Company, among many others — the television shows of the 1990s — such as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, South Park, and Seinfeld, among many others — became characterized by ironic detachment. For instance, television shows began making fun of themselves for being television shows, cynically mocking American culture, and frequently including a character’s “deadpan sneer” — the action of silently judging another character for naivety, sentimentality, or other forms of cringe (Wallace 83). In other words, 90s television used irony as a vehicle to mock and judge sincere passion and attempts at human connection, and this irony relied on a television show’s meta-awareness that the program is itself a television show.

Wallace sees irony as damaging for two reasons. First, while irony is an effective tool for entertaining and critiquing, the device “serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing.... But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” (Wallace 99). As the result of a device with no redemptive qualities running rampant on American television, Wallace concludes irony “tyrannizes us”; if the dominant rhetorical device of an era merely criticizes but does not replace dethroned concepts with anything new, the device is rendered deeply harmful to the human condition (Wallace 100). Second, by approaching everything with ironic detachment, one can avoid not only criticism but also being perceived as naive or overly emotional (characteristics largely frowned upon in the 90s) (Wallace 95). Wallace’s criticism of irony goes beyond “E Unibus Pluram”; as Wallace writes in his 1996 magnum opus Infinite Jest, “hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human” (Wallace 841). While I believe Wallace’s argument that ironic detachment shields its user from criticism to be rather weak — indeed, Wallace himself is levying criticism at the device and its users, so the device cannot be an impervious shield to criticism  — Wallace’s observation about the relationship between ironic detachment and sentimentality holds more weight.

Wallace concludes “E Unibus Pluram” by discussing how society can fight against the damaging nature of irony: embracing unabashed sincerity. To Wallace, true rebellion in a society defined by postmodern cynicism is characterized by embracing the aspects of the human experience that the ironists of the 1990s criticized: 

The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. (Wallace 112)

Wallace sees irony and sincerity is diametrically opposed; that is to say, one can and should be used as a tool to combat the other. Indeed, in his review of a book of essays about Wallace, associate professor of modern and contemporary literature at Northern Michigan University in Marquette Stephen J. Burn writes, “The only way forward, for Wallace, is to effect a break with postmodern practice, and abandon protective irony and risk sincerity” (Burn 17). While Wallace, in large part, successfully identifies a problem with television in the 1990s, to what extent is the validity of his solution? To answer this question, I will explore how television has responded to the postmodern cynicism of the 1990s and evolved in the thirty years since “E Unibus Pluram” was written.

The second half of this paper will analyze the television sitcom Community to show that irony can be used as a vehicle for sincerity, and as a result, Wallace’s claim that irony and sincerity are incompatible lacks validity. Community is a television show which ran for six seasons from 2009 to 2014 on NBC and 2015 on Yahoo! Screen (Detmering 39, 52). Created by Dan Harmon, the show centers around a Spanish study group at Greendale Community College. While the show struggled with viewership ratings during its run, Community was met with critical acclaim and a strong cult following (Tewell 2). While there are many television shows produced over the past two decades which could lend themselves well to a response to Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram,” I chose Community because the show not only grounds itself in many of the postmodern devices Wallace criticizes but also epitomizes how those devices can be used as a vehicle to portray sincere human emotion and connection. To elucidate this argument, I will evaluate the season two Community episode “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas.”

Originally aired on December 9th, 2010, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” is a Christmas-themed episode. The episode — which is nearly entirely stop-motion — is a break from the usual live-action format of the show. The show begins by study group member and pop-culture buff Abed Nadir claiming he sees the world in claymation. Concerned, the rest of the study group entlists Greendale Psychology Professor Ian Duncan, the antagonist of the story, to figure out what is causing this delusion. Duncan, convinced that publishing research on Abed’s condition will advance his career, recommends he administer therapy for Abed. Abed insists, however, that therapy is unnecessary and all that is needed for everything to go back to normal is for him to learn the meaning of Christmas.

Later, fellow study group member Britta Perry texts Abed that the meaning of Christmas can be found in the study room. When Abed arrives in the study room, he finds that Duncan, Britta, and the rest of the study group tricked Abed into group therapy. Duncan convinces Abed to stay by framing himself as a Christmas Wizard who will help Abed find the meaning of Christmas. To do so, Duncan initiates an imaginary journey through “Planet Abed.” After arriving at Planet Abed, Abed leads the group on a trip to the North Pole, where he claims he will find the meaning of Christmas. At one point during the journey, Abed tells fellow study group members Troy Barnes and Annie Edison that his parents are divorced and his mother visits him every year on December 9th to watch the animated Christmas television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. As Troy responds “But Abed, today is December 9th,” the audience realizes the lack of his mother’s presence is the source of Abed’s stop motion delusion (“Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”).

This realization is quickly confirmed when Abed reaches the North Pole. Abed finds the meaning of Christmas at the North Pole (which is a DVD of season one of Lost, prompting Abed to say, “It's a metaphor. It represents lack of payoff.”). Duncan reveals he found a Christmas card in Abed’s dorm room from Abed’s mother which reads, “I can’t make it this year. I have a new family now." Upon hearing the card read back to him, Abed freezes in a block of ice, causing the entire study group to show their support for Abed by attacking Duncan and singing about the meaning of Christmas. This act of kindness causes Abed to unfreeze, and Abed declares he learned the true meaning of Christmas: “The meaning of Christmas is the idea that Christmas has meaning. And it can mean whatever we want. For me, it used to mean being with my mom. Now it means being with you guys” (“Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”). The entire study group hugs Abed and returns to Abed’s couch in his dorm room to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The episode concludes with Abed turning off his television and the viewer seeing the reflection of the happy study group in live-action on the television screen.

“Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” epitomizes postmodern television. Most importantly, the entire episode serves as a quintessential example of dramatic irony. While the audience becomes aware over the course of the episode that the stop motion format is a device used to portray the mental state of Abed, Abed only believes that he is hallucinating. Additionally, many of the other descriptions of postmodern television in “E Unibus Pluram” fit this episode — and Community as a whole — perfectly. Abed's conclusion that Christmas is inherently meaningless and only has meaning if we give it meaning is quintessentially postmodern. Additionally, Wallace’s observation that “one of the most recognizable things about this century’s postmodern fiction has always been the movement’s strategic deployment of pop-cultural references—brand names, celebrities, television programs,” perfectly describes “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” because the episode is a pastiche of animated Christmas television specials. Furthermore, episode-long homages to pop-culture like “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” are core to Community; over the show’s six seasons, Community executes episode-long pastiches of Star Wars, westerns, Marvel movies, My Dinner with André, mafia movies, Law and Order, and many other pop-culture behemoths. Similarly, Wallace’s assertion that “the best TV of the last five years has been about ironic self-reference like no previous species of postmodern art could ever have dreamed of” evokes one of Abed’s first lines in “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”: “We're stop-motion animated.... I noticed it this morning. That's how I knew it was special. We've clearly entered a new medium” (Wallace 69, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”). By calling attention to the metatextual element of the episode’s different visual style, Abed is being self-referential. Finally, when describing an episode of the television show St. Elsewhere, Wallace writes, “Every character and conflict and joke and dramatic surge depends on involution, self-reference, metatelevision. It is in-joke within in-joke” (Wallace 68). This description impeccably applies to “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” as well. For example, in order to fully understand the climax of the episode, the viewer would need to understand (a) the episode serves as a parody of animated Christmas television specials, (b) the self-aware metacommentary about animated Christmas television specials within the episode (such as when Abed explicitly says that the cure for his delusion is learning the meaning of Christmas, thereby sardonically mocking other animated Christmas specials where this goal is implied but not explicitly said), (c) the references to pop-culture within that self-aware metacommentary (such as when Abed says the meaning of Christmas is a Lost: Season One DVD, representing lack of payoff), and (d) those references to pop-culture are in-and-of-themselves in-jokes within Community (referencing Lost is a running joke in Community, with references to Lost spanning three seasons and Josh Holloway — Lost’s lead actor — even guest-starring in season two’s penultimate episode) (“Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” “A Fist Full of Paintballs”). The Community viewer, primed to understand this series of in-jokes, is rewarded for their understanding of television with more television, making the example identical to Wallace’s experience watching St. Elsewhere (Wallace 67-68).

However, irony and these other postmodern devices are used not to cynical ends, but to deeply sincere ones. The climax of the episode — which is the study group fighting Duncan, who does not genuinely care about or want to help Abed but merely write about his delusion to advance his career — is motivated by the study group’s love of Abed, thereby affirming the value of friendship and empathy. Moments like the study group hugging Abed after he expresses his love for them and study group members Jeff and Annie singing “hanging out with the people you love and saying ‘I love you’... that's what Christmas is for” during the climatic scene communicate to the viewer the joy and value which can be found in genuine human connection (“Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”). The latter moment is particularly notable because of the line’s post-ironic nature; on the one hand, the line is sardonically winking at the viewer by parodying the traditional overtly sentimental messages in Christmas television specials, but on the other hand, Jeff and Annie do indeed hang out with the people they love and express that love in the following scenes. As a result, Jeff and Annie’s line further illuminates how a piece of media can be both cynically ironic and genuinely sentimental. Sincere moments such as the ones previously mentioned arise in the episode as a direct result of the postmodern devices the show employs. For instance, without the dramatic irony of the stop motion animation, moments like the final image of the study group smiling together on Abed’s couch after watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer would not be as powerful. In other words, Community uses irony as a vehicle for sincerity.

In American writer David Foster Wallace’s 1990 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace argues that television’s saturation with irony and other postmodern devices are damaging to society because the devices do not have redemptive qualities and are used to evade criticism, sentimentality, and genuine human emotion. Wallace asserts irony and sincerity are diametrically opposed and the solution to the ills of irony is to embrace sincerity. The television sitcom Community, however, is evidence that irony and sincerity are not only compatible, but irony can be used as a tool which conveys sincerity. To that end, Community’s season two episode “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” uses irony and other postmodern devices Wallace criticizes to advance a deeply loving and sentimental message.

To an extent, Wallace’s description of the next generation of literary rebels is accurate. Community is a show “willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile,” thus affirming Wallace’s claim that “to be really human... is probably to be unavoidably sentimental” (Wallace 112, 841). Where time has proven Wallace incorrect, however, was his assertion that these characteristics are wholly incompatible with irony and postmodern cynicism. Indeed, Community exemplifies how a piece of media can use postmodern devices such as irony as a vehicle for sincere empathy and human connection.