Which means, of course, that I’m in luck: for that tone has been resonating through every echelon of American culture, a shift affecting and informing every storytelling medium, whether factual or fictional. The Onion, of course, is only where my day gets cooking. Other browser bookmarks send me to half a dozen sites where I hope to extract similarly intemperate snorts. The best of these, for sure, I forward along to friends — fellow traffickers in yuks — who, young and old, unfailingly send me links found during their own morning frolics. These I follow no less intrepidly than Theseus did Ariadne’s thread, leading me, once again, out of my labyrinth of rage to that happier place: YouTube. There, with a dependability that would make a demographer pump his fist and an advertiser lose his shirt, I watch segments from “The Daily Show” and its spinoff, “The Colbert Report” (programs that, funnily enough, poached The Onion’s top writers). In such shows, then, I find that tone — so knowing, so over it, so smart, so asinine. And given the choice, these days, between a smartass and, well, a dumb ass, even the Academy Awards, that most treacle-toned of evenings, picked this year’s host from that clever category.

And picking the smartass, it seems, is what we’ve been doing, across the televised board. We’ve been tuning in to “The Simpsons” (in its 18th season, the longest-running sitcom in television history), which pokes tirelessly away at the idea of the American family, not to say America. We’ve been turning on “South Park” (in its 10th season, the longest-running sitcom in cable-television history), with its bile-tongued children probing every asininity (and which made a successful trip to the big screen in “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut”). We’ve been ordering in “Chappelle’s Show” (the top-selling DVD of a television series in, well. . .DVD history), with its now-embittered impresario, who, erewhile, was acid-tongued as he chewed up (and out) another cracker, whistling all the way. We’ve been showing up at “The Office,” in branches on either side of the Atlantic, each of which, with regionally adjusted inflections, paws away at its constricting white collar (not to say its creator’s later “Extras” — another kind of office, a celebrity waiting room with sexier furniture). Like the soulless producer in the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink,” our Hollywood executives have been courting the equivalent of That Barton Fink Feeling: that ubiquitous tone — so “young,” so “hip,” so “edgy.” Like the lava lamp of yore, it has been tucked into the hot corner of every room, whether “Da Ali G Show,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Boondocks,” “American Dad!,” “King of the Hill,” “The Thick of It” or, on the big screen, the no less knowing “Dawns” — and Shaun — “of the Dead,” “American Dreamz” and “Thank You for Smoking.”

But if we were to think that that tone — so sarcastic, so ironic, so sardonic — were trapped within entertainments trundled onto screens, we would be wrong. It has pervaded literary fiction for decades, from Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” to Philip Roth’s “Our Gang” to David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” No surprise, then, that it should feature in the work of our most heralded young authors of the past year, whether Gary Shteyngart’s unbridled “Absurdistan,” Colson Whitehead’s mocking “Apex Hides the Hurt,” Marisha Pessl’s madcap “Special Topics in Calamity Physics,” not to mention books by our more seasoned storytellers — “In Persuasion Nation,” by George Saunders; “The Diviners,” by Rick Moody; “Little Children,” by Tom Perotta; and “A Changed Man,” by Francine Prose.

All of these varied entertainments — human emanations on the Web, on television, at the movies and between hardcovers (whatever their differences in ambition, conception and achievement) — are attuned to the ridiculous in modern life. They are all, in other words, satirical: they revel in, and trade on, knowingness. And if we seem to be enjoying a sort of golden age of the satirical, that invites the question How successfully does satire serve our culture? That there is so much might seem proof of its expediency. After all, what could be wrong with a mode of expression that orients a critical, comical eye to flaws in the contemporary weave? And yet, you might wonder, as well, whether a culture can have too much of that knowing tone and, if so, just what that “too much” might mean.

The ancient Romans provide the beginnings of an answer, in large measure because that’s where satire has its beginnings. Just as Americans like to claim jazz as “our art form,” the Romans claimed satire as theirs. Gaius Lucilius (second century B.C.) was the first satirist, a writer vocal about the negative virtues of his fellow citizens — mostly the tendency to imitate their Greek neighbors in everything. As boastful as a modern-day rapper, Lucilius pointed to himself as the original Roman — not some Helleno-wannabe — as much because of what he lampooned (things Greek) as the fact that he lampooned at all. I am Roman, his writings say, hear me mock. And indeed, it was how such criticism was delivered that made satire different — and differently effective — from, say, a sermon. “A cultivated wit,” wrote Horace, a later Roman satirist, “one that badgers less, can persuade all the more. Artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than can severity alone.” Sounding like the always-fulminating Lewis Black of “The Daily Show,” Rome’s Juvenal tells us: “It is harder not to write satire. For who could endure this monstrous city, however callous at heart, and swallow his wrath?. . .Today, every vice has reached its ruinous zenith. So, satirist, hoist your sails.” The idiot wind, blowing every time Rome’s hypocrites moved their mouths, drove her satirists, in their artful way, to bluster back, setting a course pursued by writers living in turbulent eras ever since.

When, in 1729, the Tory politician Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) published his satirical “A Modest Proposal” — which, in the straight-faced language of a sermon, advocated solving the problem of poverty by selling Irish children as meat — his mode was perfectly ironic. Swift did not wish to see his countrymen’s children ground into shepherd’s pies. Rather, he wanted to level an attack on political opponents who were devouring the Irish people. Swift, then, was approaching a troubling question upside down and intimating a sarcastic answer. (As such, Stephen Colbert, in parodying Bill O’Reilly’s extreme rhetoric, is fully Swiftian: “The Colbert Report” works to convince us of the opposite of its host’s every misguided opinion.) For Swift’s part, he believed that satire was a way of “prompting men of genius and virtue to mend the world as far as they are able.” His fellow Augustan Alexander Pope wrote, “When truth or virtue an affront endures, the affront is mine, my friend, and should be yours.” And although satire could not be a remedy in and of itself, it was doing a good deal, Pope assured, when it could “deter, if not reform.”

Indeed, this elegant, not to say defiant, means of addressing “affronts” to truth has proved a liberating mode of expression for authors across the ages, from Chaucer to Cervantes to Voltaire. Most comprehensible of all, perhaps, is the attraction that so insubordinate a brand of comedy, a very free kind of speech, held for writers in a country formed through insubordination — our own. Prerevolutionary America was rife with satirical pamphleteers, and even Benjamin Franklin, in his “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” lampooned the misadministration of the colonies. And yet, when readers today experience the best satires of our past, editorial points that once took center stage now shuffle toward the wings. Whether in the rueful parody of Mark Twain’s “War Prayer” (“It was a time of great and exalting excitement”), the wicked ironies of Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary” (“Conversation, n. A fair for the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor”) or even the mordant sarcasm of Dorothy Parker’s “Comment” —