🎙️ Laughter Before the Fire: Irony and the End of Meaning

In this episode, Halifax lawyer and cultural theorist Shawn A. Scott takes listeners inside the moral collapse hiding beneath modern wit. Using Maureen Dowd’s 2025 column “We’re All Going to Die — Soonish!” as a case study, he explores how irony—once the conscience of civilization—has become its anesthesia.

Drawing on the legacy of David Foster Wallace, Scott traces the journey from prophetic irony to what he calls cruel irony: laughter that mocks the broken, erases the unseen, and resigns itself to despair. From Nietzsche’s disenchantment to postmodern detachment, he argues that today’s clever tone masks a deeper exhaustion—a culture that can only laugh at its own extinction.

The discussion then turns toward hope: the emerging ethic of tribunalism, a “grammar of tone” that tests every voice against truth, love, and justice. Can irony be redeemed? Can wit once again tremble before the real?

Join us for Laughter Before the Fire—a meditation on journalism, conscience, and the possibility of reverent laughter in an age that has forgotten how to believe.

☩ Tribunal of Conscience ☩
Truth. Love. Justice.

All episodes are part of the ongoing work of the Tribunal of Conscience — testing forms under the triune strain to reveal what holds and what collapses.

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Let those who see the structure, name it without fear.