About irony/sarcasm: I used to think exactly like you. I must say it was totally flawed. I don't know how to word this scientifically (and please understand I'm not religious): sarcasm hurts your soul, your heart, your mind, your spirit. It's like drugs: short term good but really bad long term.

It helps for some time and then slowly eats at you. A sarcastic person is in effect trading the possibility of hope for the comfort of accepting things. There is a way where you keep both, through forgiving, through understanding, with humility.

Humor gets a pass when it speaks of bad things, or in a bad manner, because it's a way of denouncing said things/manners. Certainly not to validate it. That's where sarcasm has its place IMHO: as a very bad manner that humor serves to show.

About Stoicism: that's true. Hence why I always preface with self-love, because the Stoic apparatus is quite unable to speak of this in modern terms. In general I agree with Ferris on this though: Stoicism is the best operating system for the human mind. Now that I know, I see it and find it in so many things, people, the good side of life (and it seems quite missing in many a miserable path).