Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

Most reviewers of Irby’s work focus on her use of humor. Irby uses a variety of different forms of humor, from embarrassing self-disclosure—as when she describes the unexpected nightmare of her first menstrual period at age 10 and her mother’s resourceful, if haphazard response—to confrontational humor—as when the grandmother she dislikes forces her to go to church on Halloween and the church-bound kids find an R-rated movie to entertain themselves. As will be discussed below, Irby makes use of lists, often humorously, to illuminate the shallow nature of American culture and the outsized anxiety she sometimes feels in response to apparently minor problems: “Hello, 911? I can't figure out where to wait for my Starbucks” (284).

Readers may also discover that Irby uses the expression “just kill me” as a coda for those frequent moments when she feels overwhelmed by the embarrassment or awkwardness of an interpersonal situation. She also plays with the phrase to give it renewed freshness, saying things like just kill me “with your powerful brain” or just kill me “without anesthetic.” She turns the phrase around when describing the combined uselessness of her parents, saying ironically that she killed them when she was a teenager. Irby’s frequent uses of profane or scatological language achieve a similar comic effect, emphasizing the intensity of her feelings or pointing toward the sardonic mindset behind her statements. Irby uses humor as a magnifying glass, to emphasize the absurdity, irony, or awkwardness of situations, thus emphasizing the social truths she wishes to express.

Though she largely refrains from preaching to her readers, Irby recognizes that she has insight and wisdom to share. Occasionally, as when she rails against the processes of financial institutions that contribute to institutional poverty, she writes in an authoritative, almost prophetic voice. More often, however, she writes in a humorous tone in which her assumed authority undercuts itself with hyperbole or Self-Deprecation. She writes, “Sadly, life is not a movie. Life is an impossibly long and unyielding march to the grave, peppered along the way with myriad disappointments and misfortunes” (81). The bleakness of this pronouncement may helpfully contradict the Pollyannaish notion that life is a romantic comedy, but it’s also noticeably too absolute to be true, or too absolute not to be itself contradicted moments later by a moment of happiness or hope.

Perhaps the most ironic of Irby’s aphorisms comes when she writes: “I'm 40 now, and the hilarious thing about being 40 is ’his: I don't know anything” (146).