They think they get it ...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

MY five-year-old daughter is now a Kung Fu Master. Or at least so she thinks. We saw Kung Fu Panda the other day, and immediately afterwards, with the speed it takes to pluck a pebble from the palm of a master, she was showing me all of her Kung Fu "moves." She started explaining to me how there are different "styles" of Kung Fu, and then did her best to show them to me: Monkey, Mantis, Tiger, and so on.

You haven't truly experienced cuteness if you haven't seen a little girl give you that half-bend-of-your-hand gesture where you beckon your opponent for an all-out battle.

That gesture--basically "come here" with four fingers instead of one--is now something of a cliche. You can find it in The Matrix as well as countless other rip-offs and cartoons. I assume it comes from Bruce Lee, but for all I know he stole it from someone else.

Before I go on, there are really two ironies at work here. Irony, as I understand the word, is the conveying of one meaning while using the language or form of another meaning. Cuteness, at least in children and puppies, is really a form of irony when you think about it. My daughter, deadly serious in her fighting-mantis pose, is adorable precisely because there is nothing deadly serious about it.

But there's a second irony at work, one that isn't so cute. To the extent she thinks about these things, now or in the future, my daughter will always think at some level that the "language" of Kung Fu movies begins with Kung Fu Panda. Similarly, her introduction to the literary world of comic-book superheroes came from a movie called The Incredibles--which is basically one giant homage to a genre with which she has no familiarity.

A similar dynamic is generally at work with "young people"--i.e., kids around college age. I can't tell you how many people think I'm referencing The Simpsons when I'm actually referencing something The Simpsons lampooned. For example, in a recent column I made reference to the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man." Several readers thought I was referring to the Simpsons send-up of that episode. Often, when I've used the phrase "now who's being naive?" college kids assumed I was alluding to The Simpsons rather than to The Godfather, because The Simpsons had parodied it.

I have friends who can quote Seinfeld from memory, but they have no idea that Seinfeld's gags are often allusions to something else. Huge numbers of college kids get their "news" from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, but only tiny fractions of these voters (!) actually watch the news that these shows are mocking.

Start listening for it, and you'll discover that we're raising a whole generation of people who think they get the joke, but don't actually get what the joke was about. Mockery has always been part of our popular culture. But, increasingly, consumers of the popular culture don't even realize that all they know is the mockery.

That's adorable with one five-year-old. But a whole generation? That's not so cute.