There have been a lot of ideas floated for showing that you’re being sarcastic online but let’s surgically destroy each one:

<sarcasm> </sarcasm>

Opening a sarcastic sentence or phrase with the html tag <sarcasm> and ending it with </sarcasm is fine. It sets up the joke in advanced, so the reader's always looking out for the lob. Imagine you’re reading that part in Julis Caesar where Mark Antony give his big, long speech and the words you read on the page goes like:



“For Brutus is an honorable man."



First, there goes the literary device. Second, why did we just read Shakespeare with parenthetical HTML tags?

The SarcMark™, /s, #sarcasm

Ending a sentence with a weird-shaped period or hashtag-sarcasm is like saying, “Hey I think you’re cute…psyche!” Sure, if that’s the best way to deliver the punchline, then that’s how it’s gotta be.

Co-opting other existing forms of punctuation

In addition to the once-$1.99-now-free SarcMark™, other forms of punctuation were offered as a solution to end misunderstood sarcasm like the interrobang ‽ which is actually just a combined question and exclamation mark and honestly, though we know what the keyboard shortcut is for the interrobang, a ?! already has purpose.



Perhaps the 🙄 emoji would work, but it’d make the Harry Potter novels, like, 10% longer. And again, why wouldn't the emoji have a lightning-bolt shaped scar on its forehead and if it does then why don't we just read a comic book then?



Additionally, ending the sentence with sarcastic punctuation indicates that the entire sentence was sarcastic. But you don’t always italicize the entire sentence you’re emphasizing. If you were using air quotes to show you're being sarcastic, you wouldn't put your hands up in the air and curl your fingers the entire time you're speaking, because that is really strange behavior.



Sometimes, you have to be super precise.