Zany Face Is the Only Emoji You Ever Really Need

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Housekeeping! There’s another ad down below, so click the hell out of it, of course. Also: When I sit down to write these, I’m often confronted with a choice: Do I go silly and weird (like today’s) or weird and depressing? To be frank, I’ve got a lot more of the latter lined up, but I don’t want this project to feel too doomy. (You can manage that on your own, I’m sure.) But I’m curious: Is too many fatalistic essays a problem?

I’ve never been great at emoji. In the early days—before 2010, when Unicode began supporting graphical emoji—I was fairly adept with the keyboard basics: ;) and :). You didn’t need much more than those, because texting, and the shorthand it necessitated, was still new. No one understood anything beyond that. :) meant “oh, this is lighthearted”; ;) meant “this is somewhat ironic”; and anything more complex than that we had to convey with, like, you know, words.

By the 2010s, though, emoji had leapt past slang and was becoming our new lingua franca. I was highly aware of this, yet far from fluent, probably because I was a new parent, focused on being an adult, and had few young friends with whom to trade fanciful texts, or racy 🍆🍑 messages. In late 2014, I even once assigned an editor who was also a superannuated white man to live-tweet coverage of a gubernatorial race using only emoji. Thankfully, there is no emoji to convey the mix of embarrassment and self-loathing I feel when I recall that evening. Or maybe there it, but I just don’t know it.

So, up until just a few years ago, I shied away from using emoji at all. Let the younger generation have it, I thought. I’ll be fine. Then, somewhere during a Slack session, I discovered zany face:

🤪 

Because there is so much variation in how different software renders emoji, I don’t know how this appears to you. But the ideal zany face should have these characteristics:

• Two eyes of unequal size, with pupils pointing in different directions

• A smile with the tongue sticking jauntily out of the mouth

• The head canted at a slight but significant angle¹

That face is a thing of beauty. It distills all the cartooning lessons of the last 150 years into a single, compact icon whose import is 100% zaniness. And zaniness is a marvelous quality! More considered than silly, funnier than madcap, zany is not something we think about or talk about much these days. Zany is unself-conscious, but not un-self-aware. Zany fux.

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The word itself comes to us from Italian, or really Venetian dialect: Zanni being the local form of Gianni, which is their version of Jack. In Italian commedia dell’arte, the Zanni were stock characters—clowns, yes, but moreso fools, and witty, acrobatic fools, whose antics provided counterpoint to the drama. Harlequin was a Zanni, as was Pulcinella, or Punch, and you can feel their influence in, say, Robin Williams, Chris Farley, or (duh) Harley Quinn.

As recognizable as zany is, I don’t know that it’s a particularly popular or common mode of being these days. We tend to be a little too cautious with our words and behavior. After all, people are watching! Silly is easier, and more forgivable. Zany… we don’t know how to take zany.

Which is why it’s such a powerful emoji! At its simplest, zany face can mean, “Who the fuck knows, so who the fuck cares?” It exempts us all from responsibility—it denies the very concept of responsibility. Often I apply it to my own statements, and it has the effect of being both self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing. Zany face says, “I certainly don’t know what I’m talking about!” and also “You know I know exactly what I’m talking about!” And still, you can’t necessarily choose which one I mean—it’s both and neither. It’s Schrödinger’s emoji.

Perhaps my favorite way to use it is when nagging someone at work—a colleague, say, or a slow-to-act vendor—to do the thing we all know they’re supposed to have done long ago. Adding it to the end of a reminder is deliciously passive-aggressive: It says, “Hey, I don’t care if this actually gets done, and isn’t it insane that we both have jobs where I even need to ask you to do this thing?” And it also says, “You know you should get this goddamn thing done, so how about it, huh? Cuz while I can make jokes about this shit all day, I’d much rather get on with things, okay?” You don’t get that with 🙃.

To be fair, I’ll admit that a few other emoji have their place: You can’t communicate these days without your basic hearts and smileys and laughing-crying and facepalms. Those are necessary, but necessary is not the same as useful. 🤮 is 💯, but it’s one-note.

There is also, of course, the shruggie: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It conveys a lot of the same meaning as zany face, but is, alas, harder to type, unless you /shrug in Slack or keep an easy-to-ctrl-C copy in your Notes app. All that is too much work—it leaves me hungry for strudel.

Recently, I’ve begun experimenting with the ultra-elaborate ASCII emoji you can find deep within your iPhone’s Chinese keyboard. These things are batshit crazy, ranging from ^ω^ and (◐‿◑) and @(・●・)@ to this furious behemoth:

┻━┻︵╰(‵□′)╯︵┻━┻

These, however, don’t feel the same. They’re too showy, require too much concentration and interpretation. (Sometimes, I guess, that’s what I want?) And how do you respond to something so baroque? You can’t. All you can do is recognize and appreciate the performance, and move on. But that’s hardly a conversation.

And so that’s really what I want from emoji, and from all written conversation: depth. I like my emoji like I like my words—complicating meaning, tweaking the tone, adding connotations, and making our interactions fuller and, uh, funner. I don’t need us to show off our encyclopedic knowledge of icons. That’s just rote memorization. I want our exchanges, whether work-related or just for fun, whether quotidian or spur-of-the-moment, to feel as witty as they are foolish. I want to be the furbo to your stupido, the Judy to your Punch. Vice-versa is okay, too. Most of all, I want to be able to drop a 🤪 in at random, whenever I like, whatever the context, and make you go: 🤔.

Notes

1. The last point is, I feel, particularly important, and it bothers me to no end that Facebook Messenger presents it uncanted.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt