Baudrillardian irony

In The Village Voice: Film: Autumn Sonata, J. HOBERMAN writes,

Jia's rootless young adults are finally in the big city—and in a dizzying Baudrillardian irony, employed at a Beijing theme park that, with its replicas of global tourist attractions, promises "a new world every day."

What the hell is "Baudrillardian irony"? Baudrillard himself speaks impenetrable bullshit:

Though I like the term well enough, parody is still perhaps a little too theatrical, too specular, in spite of everything. The parodic still has a certain power. It is true that I use the term irony a lot more, and what is more, I do not use it in the subjective sense any more. It is no longer subjective or romantic irony, nor humour in that sense. Rather it is a form of irony that is pataphysical, but objective. Before, it was subjective irony. It was to some extent connected to critique, to a critical, romantic, negative point of view, to a form of disillusion. The new irony seems to me rather to be an excess of positivity, of reality. And that is why I call it pataphysical because pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's Ubu is precisely that. It is the too full, the too much of itself, it is an absolute, total over-awareness, positivity without fault. Ubu's big gut will clearly explode one day. And that is metaphysical irony, the irony of our world, and it is related to a kind of protuberance and excrescence of the system. It is no longer ridiculous in the classic theatrical sense, it is pataphysical. Ubu swallowed his own superego.

Everything is at the same time untouchable and non-existent, and that is the irony of non-existence, of in-significance. It is more radical than the Other. The Other was still, and that, moreover, is what gave it beauty and charm, complicity in the object, whereas irony now pertains to events themselves. The events in the East, where all of a sudden, at a time when one could have believed in the fall of capital, we witness the fall of communism. And that seems to be an ironic event to me, perfectly unforeseeable, and nevertheless dependent on a fantastic logic. It is that irony, rather, that I would insist on now. But it is difficult to thematize because it no longer lends itself to laughter, nor even to a smile really! Perhaps there is an object somewhere that smiles, but we do not know it.

In Unplugging The Matrix, Matt Feeney explains,

Baudrillard is the French postmodernist who comes closest to the stony spirit (and the philosophical sophistication) of the freshman dorm: "Dude, what if this all isn't, like, really reality, but instead it's, like, a simulation of reality?"

Works for me.

Oh, and

Pataphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with imaginary solutions, and was coined by the French absurdist Alfred Jarry.

As those who recall Maxwell's Silver Hammer may know.