Day 14: The Egyptian Goddess of Irony

Our family game was always “Balderdash,” a trivia game where all but one answer is made up by the players. It goes a little like this: one player is get handed a card, on which are printed a bunch of wild but true answers — a word (with a definition) or a movie (with a plot description) or a date (with some vanishingly unlikely occurrence). They read out the word or the movie or the date or whatever, but not the definition. Then everyone secretly scribbles their fake answer which is mixed in with the real one and they’re all read out by the person who knows what the real one is. Points are given accordingly. Strictly speaking, you’re meant to assign points to the definition that sounds most like the real answer, but it is much more fun if you just vote for the one you think is the funniest.

That tended to be the way our family played it. I say “played” but we still play it, on the sadly rare occasions when we’re all in the same place, and some of the bullshit definitions we’ve come up with have passed through the fires of in-joking and been forged as family folklore.

I bring all this up as my way of introducing the Egyptian Goddess of Irony, a figure who (of course) does not actually exist, and whose corresponding word has been lost to time. But we are an irony-appreciating lot, and the idea that the ancient Egyptians had a goddess specifically attuned to the vagaries of Murphy’s Law really tickled us, to the point that the nameless deity has somewhat dogged my life. Whenever something suitably ironic happens, the Egyptian Goddess is never far from my mind, sometimes paired with a fist brandished at the uncaring sky.

In my mind she looks like Alanis Morissette by way of Cleopatra.

And isn’t it ironic how the projects we care most about, the ones we’d most like to see succeed, are the ones that so often seem to fall a bit flat or get passed over by audiences? This was always the case with the stuff I wrote, as far back as my student media days — I’d put together something I thought was an absolute blinder, or plead with audiences to consider this one Very Important piece — and it’d get passed over entirely, or (worse) damned with the faintest “oh yes, I saw that, I think”-type praise. And perhaps the agonising process of carving off little lumps of soul and presenting them for the world to consider, only to have them spurned — or even just to risk a spurning — is what led me to adopt a certain blithe, perhaps supercilious, ironic detachment about earnest things, and perhaps it plays a role in what I now think of as a decade or two of missed creative opportunities.

Irony on irony.

Late in life, I am back to embracing earnestness. I don’t think irony took me far. The Goddess will lurk still, ready to be cursed or invoked with a wry chuckle; there will always be a darkly funny side. But perhaps I need to find a new patron. Perhaps a further game of Balderdash will reveal the name of a Goddess of Earnest Endeavour, a new, cheesier, but kinder and ultimately more productive muse.

On that note, here’s the Secret Project. I’m very proud of it, even if (as early signs indicate) it completely whiffs on social media.