At the time, this tone of irony was expressed influentially in books like Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X,” which provided an entire glossary of terms to categorize ironic stances and situations, and Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club,” which portrayed political agency as a psychotic hallucination. Films like “Pulp Fiction” and “The Truman Show” exemplified the ironic sensibility, as did other television shows like “The Simpsons,” publications like The Onion and even the popularity of post-structural semantic theory on college campuses. And, in popular music, who can forget (however much they may want to) Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” which inspired thousands of conversations about what does and does not constitute an ironic situation.

All of these texts express in one way or another the ontological situation of existing in what Jean Baudrillard called a “hyperreal” register, a style of being in which the connection to a foundational reality has been definitively severed, or demonstrated never to have existed in the first place, leaving the postmodern subjects adrift in a free-floating cloud of arbitrary, interchangeable symbols. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Flash-forward several eventful decades, to Gilead. We now sing bitter songs of experience. Post-9/11, post-Charlottesville and post-El Paso, comic irony is not only tone-deaf and uncool, but also complicit with the kind of evil that flourishes outside the solipsistic bubble of Jerry’s apartment. Our millennial co-workers are correct to fault Generation X with fetishizing a worldview that is politically impotent, that represents a dead-end philosophically and aesthetically, and that is steeped in white, male, upper-class privilege. Jerry himself was aware, however indifferently, of his own self-satisfied, masturbatory, antisocial value structure, and the series itself ends by convicting the entire cast of being selfish jerks. Jerry’s psychology is far too insubstantial to bear anything as existential as true guilt. In the mode of comic irony, however, you can hold your guilt and your innocence in two hands and regard them as twin facets of a grand cosmic joke.

When Fred and Serena Waterford are arrested for war crimes at the end of the third season of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” no one is laughing, and all of the other characters, many of whom have been incarcerated at one point or another, carry their own burdens. The only irony in Gilead (or in Westeros, or in the apocalypse of “The Walking Dead”) is tragic irony, most conspicuously the irony that, in a fallen world, people’s good intentions continually fall into error and violence. Now, the mirror of television reflects back to us the image of a different historical period characterized by stark choices, impossible situations and lethal evil invading from without and within.

It is not just historical events that have caused this shift. Our public discourse, increasingly taking place on the internet, also stifles comic irony. When we speak on the internet, we become existentially wedded to the things we say. In face-to-face conversation, there are many ways that I can indicate that I am only playing a role of a person saying these things, that I am just “trying on” an idea in an ironic mode. I can play the popular Gen-X game, “let’s converse as if I believed something I don’t really believe.” In the digital world, however, when I post something, it becomes a part of my “profile.” The posted content becomes an aspect of how I exist in the world, and there is a self-reinforcing effect: I become invested in the self I express through the content I post. I am incentivized to align myself with those words, to close the gap between what I say and who I am, and this closure is fatal to irony, which depends on the self-conscious presence of such a gap.