Playing With / World of Snark

Basic Trope: Everyone is a smartass here.

• Straight: Every character has something sarcastic to say.
• Exaggerated:
  • Everyone is a Deadpan Snarker, regardless of age, species (with cats reigning supreme), societal status, mental faculties, physical abilities, usefulness in a fight (or lack of), classification as a living being, or capacity to speak. Everytime someone even quips their facial muscles barely move aside from their mouths, and when they need to be loud their sarcasm can be heard all the way from Mars.
    • Same as above except everyone is The Snark Knight.
  • Sarcasm is the only language everyone speaks.
• Downplayed:
  • Most of the characters are snarky, but a few of them are not.
  • All of the characters are snarky, but only when amused, annoyed or stressed. They’re otherwise polite and serious.
• Justified:
  • A keen eye and clever tongue are explicitly highly admired in the setting, or at least the culture of the protagonist's social circles.
  • In what is otherwise a People's Republic of Tyranny, this is the only respite from the dreariness of life.
  • Snark is everyone’s coping mechanism about the Crapsack World they live in.
• Inverted: Every character is unfailingly sincere and polite.
• Subverted: The cast of main characters is full of snarkers... but when they go out into the world outside their friend group, people just find it obnoxious.
• Double Subverted: The cast of main characters is full of snarkers. When they go out into the world outside their friend group, the first few people they encounter find it obnoxious for a gag, but they're the exception; most are as snarky as they are.
• Parodied: Cutting utterances are treated as money in this locale. For example, when you go to eat out, it's customary to engage in witty antagonistic repartee with one's server, and if you can top the server, the meal is free.
• Zig Zagged: Everyone is sarcastic on one day and sincere on the next.
• Averted: Not many characters are wisearses.
• Enforced: "Everyone loves sarcasm, right? Let's make all characters to be sarcastic."
• Lampshaded:
  • "Welcome to a world where everyone is a sarcastic jackass. We hope you feel comfortable in staying with us."
  • “Gosh, is it even possible for these assholes to be sincere for once?!”
• Invoked: "If we slip this up, the whole room is going to be quipping at us. And I just know they'd love a chance to quip, the little social vultures."
• Exploited: Because everybody's being sarcastic, some people are able to vent/hide important info by disguising their genuine feelings as Sarcastic Confessions.
• Defied:
  • Almost everybody was about to say something sarcastic or snarky, but deliberately hesitate and decided to be quite sincere and tactful instead.
  • After the fiftieth case of Offing the Mouth, Bob has made perfectly clear that he'll never speak like this and he doesn't tolerate other people speaking like this around him, either.
• Discussed: "Nothing about this group tells me we can stop being sarcastic. Even pure joy is sarcastic. I think the last time anyone has said something genuine is when I told you guys I had to go to the bathroom."
• Implied: There is a cut to the executive producers reading through the script and one yells out "who the !"#" wrote this thing!? Joss Whedon!?"
• Conversed:
  • "Ugh! I hate the characters of this show! Everyone always has something snarky to say about each other!"
  • "Good fucking grief. Ever since Joss Whedon came along, all of these shows and movies have dialogue that consists of just a hundred quips per second. It's honest to God fucking annoying."
• Deconstructed:
  • As more characters trade in snarks at each other, the characters will break their sarcastic front and reveal their true feelings of hatred and contempt towards each other and now the Crapsack World is worse than it was before.
  • At some point, someone's gonna get pissed that sarcasm is the only kind of conversation they get from everybody else in the cast 24/7/365/however many years they have known them and they're definitely going to do something really awful about it.
  • In a sense that is particularly thick with irony, a world in which everybody is a sarcastic joker is as devoid of individuality as the world in which everybody is forced to keep their mouths shut.
• Reconstructed: A group of idealists (snarky idealists, mind you) overthrow the people's republic of tyranny. With prospects as high as they've ever been, everyone lightens up, though being sarcastic has become something of a tradition and is honoured as such.
• Plotted A Good Waste: The Hero of Another Story and his supporting cast are all a bunch of mile-a-second snarkers who always have an agile verbal riposte to anything that happens, but Bob is undergoing a tragedy and he can barely commmunicate (no, not even non-vocally), let alone string together a sentence that could be labeled "sarcastic".
• Played For Laughs: The whole play is a Howard Hawks-style non-stop rapid-fire barrage of sarcastic exchanges from the word "go".
• Played For Drama:
  • The whole cast is full of Sad Clown-types who will inevitably break down if they stop using sarcasm and know perfectly well that they are coming off like insensitive assholes to the average guy on the street, which feeds their mental issues.
  • If everybody and the literal dog is unable to string two words together without turning them into some kind of joke, someone who Does Not Understand Sarcasm is going to appear by sheer law of averages, and it probably will end in tears.
• Played For Horror: Most, if not all, of the cast are sociopaths and speak constantly like they were cribbing from a badly-written Joss Whedon script because 1) they don't care about sounding sensible and 2) Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor.

---

Welcome to the World of Snark. Everyone here's nice, friendly, and welcoming, and totally not a bunch of smartassed douchebags.

---