226 ?<► SHADY CHARACTERS

Who, then, did create ironies? In Mencken’s place a later
twentieth-century newspaperman enters the frame, this
time the English columnist and reviewer Bernard Levin. A 2008
article entitled “Ha Ha Hard,” published in Levin’s old paper The
Times of London, began:

Humour is a funny thing. Or sometimes it’s not. It’s
certainly an easily misunderstood thing. The late, great
Bernard Levin used to say that The Times should have a
typeface called “ironies” to warn his more poker-faced
readers when he wasn’t being serious.49

Levin was similar to H. L. Mencken in many ways: prodigiously
talented, prodigiously opinionated, and loyal to a single newspaper
for much of his career.50 Also like Mencken, Levin is an enticing can¬
didate for originator of this script dedicated to irony, but again the
truth fails to cooperate. Levin, by his own account, did not invent
ironies, but was merely the first journalist to bring them to light. In a
1982 column for The Times* Levin identified a certain Tom Driberg, a
recently deceased Labour MP and Peer of the Realm, as their creator:

As for trying to be funny—well, long ago the late Tom
Driberg proposed that typographers should design a new
face, which would slope the opposite way from italics, and
would be called “ironies”. In this type-face jokes would be

Levin s column about ironies was also published by Encounter, a British literary and cultural
journal that ran from 1953 to 1991, and that is worthy of a digression all of its own. Encounter
had the bizarre distinction of having been set up and covertly funded by the US Central Intel¬
ligence Agency and the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, with the aim of making up for the
lack of anti-Communist rhetoric emanating from the popular—and left-wing—New Statesman.
Its Cl A funding became public knowledge in 1967, prompting the resignation of its editor and
cofounder Stephen Spender (coincidentally, an Oxford contemporary of Tom Driberg), who
claimed to have known nothing about the identity of his backers.5'

IRONY AND SARCASM 227

set, and no-one would have any excuse for failing to see
them. Until this happy development takes place, I am left
with the only really useful thing journalism has taught
me: that there is no joke so obvious that some bloody fool
won’t miss the point.52

While they may not have invented ironies, Levin and Mencken shared
the same dim view of the relative wit of the common people.

That Tom Driberg—not H. L. Mencken, Keith Waterhouse, or
indeed Bernard Levin—was the originator of ironies was seconded by
Brooke Crutchley, onetime head of Cambridge University Press. Ina
1994 letter to The Independent, Crutchley wrote:

The late Tom Driberg had an idea for avoiding such
misunderstandings, namely, the use of a typeface slanted
the opposite way to italics. He suggested it should be
known as ‘ironies’.53

So much as is possible within a newspaper’s letter pages and editorial
columns, here was independent confirmation of Driberg as inventor
of ironies.

Born in England in 1905, the son of a civil servant, Thomas Edward
Neil Driberg gave every appearance of being a respectable politician,
a successful journalist, and a devout churchman. A member of the
Communist Party of Great Britain as a young man, in 1945, Driberg
switched allegiance to the Labour Party and subsequently enjoyed
a long career as a Labour MP. Serving as chairman of the Labour
Party in 1957 and 1958, in 1965 he ascended to the heights of the Privy
Council, a body that advises the queen in exercising her powers, and
ultimately was named Baron Bradwell just a year before his death in
1976. Parallel to this were his journalistic endeavors: writing for the
widely read broadsheet Daily Express, the young Tom Driberg landed