Sarcastic intertextualities as ‘Angry Speech’ in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

Starting from John Osborne’s negative reaction to theatre critics’ and journalists’ perception of Look Back in Anger’s idiosyncratic language as “angry”, as well as their perception of the protagonist Jimmy Porter as a representative of the Angry Young Man movement, this paper considers sarcasm as one of the key aggressive rhetorical devices used in the language of the play. Osborne thought that the specific, even revolutionary rhetoric of his play was in most cases misunderstood and wrongly conveyed in theatre adaptations as “angry”, which made the performance lose the edge that the language of the play had the potential for. Look Back in Anger provides an insight into the Porters’ lower-class mundane dailiness, charged with verbal aggression and intertextual allusiveness stemming from deeper political, historical and social issues of mid-twentieth-century Britain. This paper focuses on Jimmy Porter’s prevalent use of sarcasm as a weapon in his personal battle, by taking John Haiman’s Talk Is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation, and the Evolution of Language, to illustrate how the language of Look Back in Anger coincides with Haiman’s conclusions on the theoretical and applied characteristics of sarcasm in contemporary society.