Do Americans "not get sarcasm"?

[VulakAerr]

Leaving aside warning signs such as emoticons etc., this is the issue with sarcasm, and I know a few other people have said it here:

Sarcasm is more or less undetectable in text, because it is all about your tone.

Irony, however, if well-crafted can be used in speech OR text, because it is ONLY about the content of what you're saying, not the tone.

That's why Daily Show correspondents (as a stellar example of masters of irony) are absolutely deadpan when they deliver their comedy. It's about what they're saying, not how they're saying it.

Sarcasm is just irony made obvious by tone.

OT: I believe East coasters are generally very likely to understand sarcasm or irony, West-coasters (particularly in California in my experience) don't even have the word on their radar.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

You put a letter "i" in between brackets at the beginning, and then "/i" between brackets at the ending.

Does that work on most forums or merely this one, with the brackets and slashes?

It works on most forums, as the typical backend running a forum will have support for BBCode, which is what all those {img}, {b}, {i}, {center}, {footnote}, etc tags are (except the real ones don't use curly brackets). Some forums give you a gui interface that essentially inserts those characters into your post to change how they display, some allow direct drag and drop between the browser and document editing software, but pretty much all of them will let you muck around with your formatting by hand if you know what tags to use. There's a sticky thread in the User Reviews section that goes over most of them.

And if a forum (or other venue where you can post things) doesn't support BBCode, it probably supports HTML formatting, and a lot of those tags are just the same thing as BBCode, but with enclosing them instead of brackets.

 

[Jake the Snake]

*Scowls lightly* Of course Americans get sarcasm. I use it every day, and comedy wouldn't be nearly as funny without it. (ie Bill Engval's "Here's Your Sign") Stop trying to validate stupid prejudices on the internet.

Now I'm not trying to offend anybody, honest, but it seems like all Brits have horrible teeth. Is this true?
^ See how misinformed that sounds?