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This is funny no matter how you read it. But the last line achieves its full snarky glory only if you know that in 1976, when Vidal wrote these sentences, Capote was a sodden mess. Vidal's insult is perfectly phrased. How could one be against it? A writer like the Roman poet Juvenal (discussed in the Second Fit), who deploys a virulent, sometimes obscene wit -- an early case of snark, I think -- can make proper writers seem timid and slow.

Another, more complicated example of contemporary high snark -- or, rather, attempted high snark: The literary editor and critic Leon Wieseltier reviewed The Second Plane, a collection of essays about Islamic extremism by the English writer Martin Amis, in the New York Times of April 27, 2008, and, at great length, Wieseltier deplored Amis's lack of seriousness. Amis, he wrote, used the catastrophe of 9/11 to show off his brilliant phrasemaking; instead, he should have tried -- more soberly and with better information -- to understand the nature of radical Islam. Wieseltier's clinching judgment goes like this: "Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer." Now, this is a knowing signal to readers who believe that Saul Bellow was a greater writer than Norman Mailer. Yet it's an odd insult, since most of us would hardly turn scarlet with shame if Mailer's The Armies of the Night or The Executioner's Song suddenly turned up on our résumé. What is there to "pity"? In that respect, Wieseltier's remark is a misfire. In another respect, it's a stealth dart aimed directly at Martin Amis's heart. An even smaller group of readers would know that Amis adores Bellow's work and dislikes Mailer's. The snark is unspoken: You write like someone you despise, not like your hero.

At the more popular level, there is a fine piece of wickedness perfected by the British humor magazine Private Eye. In the sixties, a British woman journalist, disappearing from a London party, had a pleasing encounter with a former cabinet minister in the government of Ugandan dictator Milton Obote; afterward, reappearing, she said that the two were "upstairs discussing Uganda." Thereafter, and for decades, whenever any public figure was taunted by the magazine for illicit sex, he or she was described as having "Ugandan discussions." The British libel laws are tougher than ours; the Uganda euphemism (and there were others) began as a way of avoiding libel, but it became a snazzy repeated joke, an insult that gathered laughter around it every time it was applied to a new victim. The two hundred thousand or so readers of Private Eye gloried in a gag that united them within the walls of an exclusively knowing club. "Ugandan discussions," a terrific piece of mid-snark, is much funnier than anything appearing in America today.

At what point do we write snark out of the book of life -- or at least out of the book of style? When it lacks imagination, freshness, fantasy, verbal invention and adroitness -- all the elements of wit. When it's just mean, low, ragging insult with a little curlicue of knowingness. Much of what passes for humor in American public discourse strikes me this way, and, in the Fourth Fit, I will set out the way snark is written today -- a kind of stylebook of snark -- and give examples. If you crave immediate proof, turn to the discussion threads that follow a routine post on so many Web sites. For every bright and easy conversation, there's another one that turns into a free-fire zone of bilious, snarling, resentful, other-annihilating rage, complete with such savories as racist taunt, nationalist war whoops ("Fuck those towel-heads"), misogynist rant, gay-baiting witticisms. In these effusions, snark is the preferred mode of attack. Everyone, it seems, wants to be a comic. I would bet that half the words written as instant messages or Twitter are snark of one sort or another. As for commenters, they don't just address the famous and powerful; they light into one another. You can't miss them if you look, and even a man as generous as Walt Whitman would be hard-pressed to hear in these flares the barbaric yawp of a free people. Then there are the college men writing on such sites as Juicy Campus who have slept with a woman and then refer to her as "a whore" by name while hiding behind anonymity (snark is their preferred mode of attack, too; more on this in the Fifth Fit). Low snark, in its current variety, is a degeneration of invective into smear or just dull slagging, and it shows up in professional venues, too -- in gossipy celebrity and sports sites; in daily and weekly newspapers desperately trying to reach young readers and hoping that a snippy-snappy tone is the way to do it.

It turns out that in the wake of the Internet revolution, snark as a style has outgrown its original limited function. The Internet has allowed it to metastasize as a pop writing form: A snarky insult, embedded in a story or a post, quickly gets traffic; it gets linked to other blogs; and soon it has spread like a sneezy cold through the vast kindergarten of the Web. Not only that, it's there forever, since it's easily Googled out of obscurity. Along with all the useful, solid, clever, playful information and opinion circulating around, a style of creepy nastiness is rampaging all over the place, too. The zombies are biting, and a hell of a lot of us are enjoying the spectacle. The Internet did not invent sarcasm, or the porous back fence where our gossiping parents gathered, or the tenderly merciful tabloids; but it provides universal distribution of what had earlier reached a limited number of eyes and ears. In brief, the knowing group has been enlarged to an enormous audience that enjoys cruelty as a blood sport.

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No one should take this essay as a request that all the angry people curl up in someone's lap and purr. Savage insult, especially insult directed at the powerful, is a necessary part of democratic culture, and in some ways we live in a great age of comedy and popular satire. Talent jumps up out of nowhere on some of the blogs, joining up with people like Sacha Baron Cohen, Chris Rock, Tina Fey, and Sarah Silverman; Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert; the crew at Saturday Night Live; the people who put out the satirical rag The Onion; the creators of The Simpsons and South Park and Family Guy. These are culture heroes, and rightly so, and they don't practice snark but something finer, or something crude and free, bold and happy -- satire, spoof, lampoon, burlesque, all heaven-sent forms. They are entertainers, but sometimes much more. I will take a quick, admiring look at some of their forebears -- the origins of snark in the noisy drinking clubs of ancient Greece; the poets and orators who practiced invective as a formal mode in classical Athens and Rome; the devastating eighteenth-century conservative wits Pope and Swift; the Oxford cutups and cutthroats who started Private Eye in the sixties; the media-savvy men who penetrated the walls of the famous in Spy magazine, the premier outlet for American snark in the eighties. In contemporary writing, snark has entered a degenerate phase, and I will try to distinguish between harshly funny satirical writing and trivial kneecapping.

Parts of my argument are directed at a medium in which professional and nonprofessional writers mix together freely, exuberantly. Why argue for decency, civility, style, grace in the Internet? In a medium which, by its very nature, is free to all comers, talented and untalented, cheerful and enraged, pure and impure alike? Why would anyone set up a tearoom with linens and silver in the middle of the saloons of the Wild West? What's at stake? Well, the frontier is now absorbing the traditional elite settlements of journalism: The network news broadcasts and many newspapers and magazines are slowly, hesitatingly, but inevitably sliding into the Internet, sometimes using online sites as an adjunct, sometimes as a principal venue. This massive, sliding-cargo movement leaves established editors and writers worried, and not just because they fear unemployment. In the near future, the authority of agreed-upon facts and a central narrative of what's going on in the world could weaken and even dissolve. The Internet is remarkably adept at amplifying, correcting, ridiculing, and overturning that narrative, but it cannot, on its own, create it. In the Internet, there will be no such authority, only the many niches and bat caves from which highly colored points of view will fly wildly like confused vectors, and in that situation, no one will be right, no one will be wrong, and everything will be a matter of opinion. In that future dystopia, the most memorable bits of invective and sarcasm will attain the widest currency, and snark will reign supreme.

We are in a shaky moment, a moment of transition, and I think it's reasonable to ask: What are we doing to ourselves? What kind of journalistic culture do we want? What kind of Internet culture? What kind of national conversation? My "position" regarding the Internet is this: We have this incredible tool. Let's not screw it up. As for the mainstream press, those of us not too blinkered and panicked to notice the dreadful writing that passes itself off as fun (both in the Internet and our own work) will want to stop the spread of that stuff. Journalism is a vast sea of good and bad, but surely some demands can be made, and the distinction between toughness and cynicism, incisiveness and fatuous sarcasm, satire and free-floating cruelty -- these are differences worth fighting for in any medium. There's no need to sober up. But we can certainly toughen up. Copyright © 2009 by David Denby