That would be the pun.
The worst verbal sarcasm is delivered with an obvious tellāeye rolling, drawn out syllables, a snort at the end. Properly done sarcasm has none of that, and the fact that itās easily missed is a feature, not a flaw.
Same with written sarcasm.
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tell that to the guy in the polo shirt.
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The idea behind Sartalics was proposed earlier, by me in 2002 as a Sarcastic Font style, and even earlier by H.L. Mencken who wanted a typewriter to achieve the same effect.
The Sartalics method produces the left leaning text by skewing text via css. It was proposed by a group of interns at BBH Labs and is a cleaner way of doing it on the web.
How about the good old exclamation mark, repeated at least twice for good measure?
āSarcastic reverse italics surely are the best idea Iāve heard all day!!ā
āJust wait until you read about this other guy whoās proposing using exclamation points. Itās GENIOUS!!!ā
āOMG ITāS BRILLANT!!!1!!1oneā
The joy of sarcasm is partially in watching the reactions of the uncynical to the disguised barbs and traps within the sarcastic statement. Itās a wheat and chaff thing. Like sailing, it takes skill and practice to feel just how close to the wind you can sail without trespassing on insult, nor failing to imbibe a statement with adequate clues. Tone management, thatās it.
Iād vote for hitting the āReplyā button as the marker.
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Dave Foley really wants to be your friendā¦
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I abuse the ā:pā emoticon to indicate when Iām joking. I find it effective, but perhaps people are just used to my flavor of nonsense. 
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Mark Twain didnāt need a god-damned sarcasm emoticon and neither do we. If your sarcasm is not as finely tuned as his then youāve got a project, havenāt you?
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Dead babies are at their most succulent sans additives.
I was about to post this!
My policy is this:
If a person is too stupid to understand and isnāt interested in understanding, then suck shit cause theyāre not gonna understand. The smart people who do understand will judge.
If a person is too stupid to understand but they demonstrate a genuine interest in understanding then Iāll give them some time to help them get it.
You canāt write for everyone or what you write suffers. Take movies: movies that have some key prop or action relevant to the story which is supposed to be subtly written-in often make the object/action appear in the most obvious, contrived way possible resulting in the movie seeming as if itās written for unobservant teenagers on crack.
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Thatās a great ideaā¦
Ā¬_Ā¬
Wow. Some of the comments here make me feel optimistic that elitism is a thing of the pastā¦
@_@, Ā¬_Ā¬ , :-/, /sā¦ etc.
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Iāve just blown my own mindā¦
We donāt need a sarcasm mark; we need a not-sarcasm mark!
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FWIW, the only solution Iāve found is to either make the sarcasm so broad that itās impossible to misread, or to use whatever markup gives it that clarity. Standardization is less necessary than simply remembering that if people can possibly misread your words, someone WILL misread your words.
Of course if you INTEND to make a nonproductive messā¦
(BB āhelpfullyā discards my own preference, which is XML-styled markup such as <snark/> rather than emoticons. Obviously I can force it, but in most cases it isnāt worth the additional effort.)
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How about people write better?
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I know, I know. Indulge me.
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Love it!
What is that from? Big Bang Theory? I see the CBS logo in the corner there. I didnāt realize Darleneās boyfriend from Roseanne is in that show. I loved that kid.
