A couple of years ago it briefly became the conventional wisdom that irony was over. It was the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, my old friend and Spy magazine co-founder Graydon Carter, who made the pronouncement -- "irony is dead" -- to a New York Times reporter. At the time, right after September 11, the understandable feeling was that cultural life had suddenly and maybe permanently become a very solemn affair.

But then a few months later, after the depressing and discombobulating initial trauma of 9/11 had passed, Graydon felt obliged to say to a different reporter: I meant to say IRONING is dead -- not 'irony,' IRONING.

In other words, real but absolutely ironic retraction.

And I realized this week that the 20-year-old Age of Irony not only resumed, it may have picked up momentum.

One recent afternoon among the holiday flood of catalogues gushing through my mail slot I spotted one from a company called Despair, Inc.

My curiosity was piqued.

Despair, Inc.'s catalogue is as colorful and glossy as any regular gift catalogue. And it is also, in every respect, a spot-on parody of a certain kind of horrible, treacly, would-be-inspirational corporate-ese.

But it's not merely a parody -- Despair Inc. is an actual business as well. They sell posters and note cards and sticky pads and calendars and mugs that look just like real motivational kitsch, complete with sentimental stock photos and punchy, portentous aphorisms.

Such as a photo of a perfect lake vista at sunset, beneath it the giant word, "Motivation," and under that the following life lesson: "If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."

Or a picture of a gloriously silhouetted man and woman running along a ridge, also at sunset, with the word "Persistence," and the exhortation, "It's over, man. Let her go."

Or an image of a ferocious bear about to catch and eat a salmon leaping upriver: "Ambition," it says, "The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly."

Despair Inc. was new to me -- I've only discovered since that it's been around for six years. So, standing over the pile of mail the other day I had the pure pleasure of encountering their fake-perky catalogue for fake-bleak products without any expectations, which made it for me a kind of perfectly startling conceptual-art experience.

The next day I read about a new Off-Off Broadway show that opened last week for a limited run called, "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant."

It's an hour-long retelling of the actual biography of L. Ron Hubbard, the late writer who dreamed up the religion Scientology in the 1950s.

The show, presented more or less in the form of a children's nativity pageant, is performed by a cast of actual children.

The writer and director of the show concedes that it's a "deeply ironic concept" but claims it does not mock the church of Scientology. He says it's "a celebration of sorts" -- emphasis, I believe, on "of sorts," as with all such irony-fests.

The local president of the historically quite litigious Church of Scientology has made litigious noises about "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant."

"In general," Reverend John Carmichael told the New York Times, "I don't think you should ridicule a religion that helps people."

I don't believe the Reverend Carmichael was speaking ironically.

This is KA in Studio 360.

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