“Every reader will have the greatest difficulty detecting irony that mocks his own beliefs or characteristics. If an author in-vents a speaker whose stupidities strike me as gems of wisdom, how am I to know that he is not a prophet? If his mock style seems like good writing to me, what am I to do? And if his incongruities of fact and logic are such as I might commit, I am doomed.”

Soren Kierkegaard