Irony vs. Sarcasm: the humour of the Brits

I wasn't aware that there was a real difference between sarcasm and irony, but over the last week it has become apparent to me and I will need to work on my irony skills if I want anything but strange looks. Example:

I am on a committee to 1) redecorate our student common room and 2) possibly add a bar to it. I find this rather interesting since I am 1) colour blind and 2) don't drink, but be that as it may, someone had to volunteer for this thing. Besides, who else would suggest pink as a theme colour? Also it should be noted that the committee is made up of three men. We are off to a good start. So I figured we should bring a woman on board who might be good at this sort of thing, or at least have a sense for matching colours. As another background insight we had just finished a student meeting setting up this committee and it was the most labourious process of motions and ratification, a process that needs to be done twice even if everyone is in agreement! Very interesting systems they have over here.

So I told one of the other members of the committee that I had invited this female student to join us and his response was "well, we will probably have to go through a search process and then have the requiste votes in the next two meetings before establishing her as a offficial or non-official member." I kind of looked at him funny and said "I don't think we need to do that, do we?" At this point he made it clear it was a joke, which I was confused about. Especially since he deadpanned it. So I guess that is British irony.

Now my main style of humour is either sarcasm or the non sequitur. The non sequitur works fine because no one is supposed to understand what is going on, but my sarcasm is almost completely useless here. An example:

That same evening we went out to a pub and were talking about evangelism and such. I forget how this came up but something about America's liberation of countries and the Gospel, and I said that deomocracy and the Gospel are two words for the same thing, emphasising that you can't have Jesus in Iraq unless we force them into a democratic government with our superior military strength (I think I cited the tank called "the new testament"). God bless George Bush! All I got was strange and uncomfortable looks, like they thought I actually believed that Bush's main motivation for Iraq was spreading the message of Christ.

So it has been a struggle for me here with my humour because I am always explaining my statements and reassuring people that I am using sarcasm, which I always thought was the same as irony, but apparently is quite different. I guess I am kind of disappointed because I really prefer sarcasm to irony, but then again the phoenix is always riding, isn't it?

As a side note, I just finished a postmodernism essay (which was fragmentary, unlegitimized and definitely a discourse of power) but found out I wrote it all in vain. Apparently there is an amazing site called the "Postmodern Essay Generator"(http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/) which immeadiately cranks out postmodern essays when you click on it. My last two essay titles were "The Collapse of Discourse: Cultural posttextual theory and the subcultural paradigm of expression" and "Neodialectic theory and subcapitalist appropriation." Awesome.