Universal human trait.

Look up the history of the word "nice" in England, sometime. But no, it is not just an English-speaking phenomenon, either.

Right, irony and sarcasm are universal (afaik). But I had in mind that americans tend to use e.g. “so bad” in a sense of “so good”, which is not so ubiquitous. (I’m only familiar with English, Russian, Deutsch and Tatar really, so my thought is limited to these four.)

One summer when I was at Bloomberg, there was an announcement that some interns had been assigned to implement an internet sarcasm detector, and that they had been completely successful. No one questioned it.

BTW when I told my wife about this, she thought I meant they had been completely successful.