The ultimate faux-pas is not laughing at someone's artfully told joke. Especially when it's a huge in-joke, but stuff it! I did not find the Eurovision song contest in any way funny or joyful. Forgive me, for I have sinned against the law of irony. Instead of loving the whooping Twitter snark and the "witty" live blogging, I committed a veritable thought crime. Instead of thinking "This is so bad it's good", I thought, "This is so bad it's execrable": a futile exercise that people are trying desperately to make "fun".

Compulsory fun may be the anti-Viagra of actual pleasure but it's everywhere. "We" are addressed as an imaginary audience who are hysterical for a street party, a sight of the Olympic torch, a scone on a plate, basically any old tack. Who wants to be a killjoy, a party pooper – or the near social equivalent of being a paedophile – someone with "no sense of humour"?

OK, me! Here in the corner! I have had enough of the dominant discourse of irony. About everything. The way we are all coerced into enjoying things with an air of detachment and superiority. It's so tiring: it has been like this for 30-odd years, with people regularly and wrongly declaring the end of irony. Essays were written after 9/11 that could now be précised as "shit got real". When Gordon Brown became British prime minister, the end of celebrity was also proposed. Well, we know what happened there: temper tantrums and even more obsession about the sweat patches and malformed toes of people we have barely heard of.

Every tabloid trifle, every titillating bit of pop culture naffness, is respun via clever ironic takes. Oh, how we laugh at the tastes of the masses. I am as guilty of this as everyone else, but I am bored with it, for this constant undertow of negativity is now nothing but conservative. It is far easier and usually much more amusing to write a nasty takedown than to say what can be beautiful and life-affirming about culture high and low.

Irony is not new nor an invention of postmodernism. Postmodernism is properly understood really as camp for straight people. And it's worth understanding what camp once was. As Susan Sontag explained back in 1964 in Notes on Camp, it was about how everything can be put in quote marks, not about replacing good with bad but applying a new set of aesthetics; it was about answering the problem of "how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture".

When camp goes mainstream, though, it loses its power, thus Graham Norton was shipped out to Azerbaijan to be snippy. Why? Did the Eurovision need this meta-camp bugle shouting: "Look! Foreign people making terrible music!"

Quite possibly, for this is the age where everything is not just of itself but about itself. We are all meta now, darlings! Thus it's possible to walk around the Hirst exhibition and pinpoint precisely the stage when the art goes from being about the big concepts (life-and-death kind of stuff) to being about art or the art market itself. This may work for some as a huge conceptual joke (mega meta), though not a new one. And it's interesting that Hirst himself as well as his critics are again asking the quaint question of whether he can actually paint.

The reign of irony also means a lot of comedy that represents itself as edgy, from Ricky Gervais to Sacha Baren-Cohen, is now repetitively dull, reinforcing prejudices rather than challenging them. This is hardly suprising, for how can something be subversive when it is the dominant and overriding language anyway? Satire has few places to go when popular culture pumps out its own ironic defence mechanisms internally. Camp, no longer the preserve of gays or aesthetes, now belongs to crappy talent and reality shows. No arch commentary can puncture this self-satisfied bubble. Or make it better than it is.

For we are afraid, I think. The legacy of postmodernism is this apolitical vacuousness and aesthetic relativism that does not want to call anything absolutely good or bad, that is scared of taking things too seriously.

We are now so impervious to the slings and arrows of the totes amazeballs fun world that only sad sacks complain. For irony is brilliant in short bursts, thus great on Twitter and Facebook. As David Foster Wallace said, though, irony cannot go the distance. He wrote of "trendy sardonic exhaustion". Yes, I know exactly what that means. Lewis Hyde thought irony should be saved for emergencies and perhaps we are in an emergency now, but again he pointed out the problem with it: "Carried over time, it is the voice of those who come to enjoy their own cage."

I want this cage to be rattled, at least. So what strikes me increasingly is that the most subversive thing anyone can do in this time of all–encompassing irony, is to care about something and do it well.

And if that's too earnest, I trust you can make your own gags.