December 10, 2023:
To adopt such a stance is to have a certain attitude not only toward the things that are done in one's social world but also toward the people in that world who do those things. Consider here the radical verbal ironist's attitude towards his hearers. He is indifferent to them, unconcerned as to how they take what he says; as a consequence, he is detached not only from the practice in which he (pretendingly) takes part but from those with whom he (pretendingly) engages within the practice. He does not take them as colleagues in a shared enterprise, nor even as witnesses to his displays of verbal cleverness. Their responses are irrelevant to his all consuming activity of self satisfied playacting.
— Andrew Cross, "The perils of reflexive irony" in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p.134
Professor Falstaff would never have been tolerated in the era of Political Correctness. Someone, certainly a student, very likely me, would have called him out. For his clique-ism, his priority interest in undergraduate XX chromosomes, and, end of day, what I now perceive in hindsight as simple lack of expertise. That lack being the core and crux of what he hid with the habitual ironic posturing Kierkegaard analyzed presciently 140 years earlier. By the era of #MeToo he'd have been fired, sued, and possibly jailed.
He and his poker partner, my faculty advisor, perhaps imagined their ironic posturing came from Nietzsche. There was a certain Germanophile orientation: Thomas Mann, diesel Mercedes. And Nietzsche. The ironists as Übermenchen, from a misunderstood literalization of what the Mad Philosopher was on about. I think Kierkegaard better captures them both.