But his legacy and ideas lived on, and stimulated the Institute's most fertile era. (Oddly enough, it coincided with the rise and domination of mass-media culture.) Lucius had been constantly amazed that men who had never experienced a double-edged reaction could be stirred to dissolute irony by the mere sight of certain advertisements in the daily journals. Before his death, he had speculating that there might there be an irony-producing component to the ink. Was the very blood of the commercial medium infected? It was indeed, and in 1933 Institute scientists developed a means to extract irony from the printed image, thereby assuring it would never infect the viewer. The technology languished in the Depression years, but when World War Two struck, the Government took a keen interest in the Institute’s machinery. Contracts were drawn up; plants were built. Nearly every printed public document in the 40s came from machines equipped with Institute Extractors. FDR himself credited the Institute’s savvy with making the Soviet alliance palatable to the American people.

The postwar years, however, were hard. Much of the public seemed to reject irony on its own. While the Institute still prospered, it was beginning to lose its way. A shift to computerization in the early 60s prepared the Institute to face the needs of the future. But none of the machines could predict what happened next.

Slowly, gradually, inexorably, irony became desirable. Years before, Bob D. Johnson - aged, but still the Institute’s head - had warned of the dangers of performers such as Mort Sahl, who made irony attractive to post-war intellectual circles. (Johnson, by now a disengaged and delusional figure living in the top floor of the Wichita Hilton, would later attempt to have Sahl assassinated with an exploding newspaper.) Other media influences employed irony with a bright brisk sneer, and suddenly the Institute found itself faced with a culture it could not repair. Government contracts expired on Aug 8, 1973, and were not renewed. The once-busy campus of the Institute emptied out, tended only by acolytes who watched in horror as the culture became drenched in irony.

The Institute might have passed from human memory, save for a moment in late 1983, when Cal Fitzman, one of the Board of Directors, read the results of a survey on Ironic attitudes. “I’ve polled the American people, he said, adding after a pause, “and you know how painful that can be.”

There was silence. A long, horrified silence -

And then the room exploded in laughter.

Mr. Fitzman had quoted David Letterman, acoylte of the New Irony the kids seemed to enjoy so much, and the Board of Directors of the Institute of Official Cheer had loved it. The Institute would never be the same.

New blood was brought in. Auditors were astonished to find that the Institute controlled nearly 16 million barrels of liquefied irony in underground tanks - enough to re-ironize nearly every single-dimensioned cultural product from 1932 to 1973. The decision was made. The irony extractors were converted into Irony Injectors, and work was begun.

What you see here, at this site, is a small fraction of the Institute’s Labors. Day and night the machinery thunders, drenching the old texts in the irony that gives them meaning. Our work will continue; our work must continue.

And what would Lucius have said? As he said once to his official biographer: “You know, in Hindoo countries, testicles can be regrown. Or so I have been told.”

In that spirit, the Institute lives on.

NEXT: a section of advertisements from the Institute Archives.