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Comment by ACow_Adonis | Hacker News Reader

To be perfectly fair, human beings can't pick up on sarcasm reliably: or at the very least it seems to be cultural/contextual.

Australians/brits consistently bemoan the inability of Americans to understand deadpan and sarcasm.

And I'm even reminded of one of my European friends (from Austria) bemoaning conversations with Germans along the lines of:

Austrian: "could you be any more condescending!?" German: "yes I could be more condescending."...blank stare.

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That is very much a statistically significant thing, yes. I'm Danish. Get along fine with Brits and Aussies, deadpans, understatements and poisonous sarcastic barbs translating well enough both ways. With Americans present, experience has taught me to shift into a far more cautious mode. And often these days, what Americans describe as irony, I fail to recognize as such.

A very broad generalization, of course, but has served me well enough as survival guide.

In some parts, "irony police" are a running joke - people will explain why any given example of irony is not really ironic.

Honest question: does the Austrian in your example not understand the deadpan/sarcasm or is he/she merely annoyed by it? Sometime it may not be a question of understanding but just of preferred communication patterns.

But yeah, there's definitely a lot of culture and context involved.

So, is it the Austrian who is not picking up on the sarcasm? Or the German.

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