Well, color me stupid then. In my four years at the Dope I’ve never had to ask a more humiliating question.
Could someone please tell me what the hell this is supposed to mean?
Oh and speak s-l-o-w-l-y. 
Thanks in advance.
I can only try. First, let me say that PJ is one caustic individual whose politics don’t interfere with an amazing wit.
First, the notion of Irony, as I read it, is that something is said or done that gains its humor or “real meaning” from being a twist, if not an outright reversal, on what is said or done.
“I really loved this show.” can be taken as a statement of appreciation if it is read directly as a statement of fact. Context, tone of voice, body language, or some other clues could inform the person paying attention that the speaker meant, if not the absolute opposite, at least some displeasure with the show.
This requires an attentive listener. Stupid people are, pretty much by definition, not attentive listeners. Thus, PJ’s point.
How’s that?
I think what he means is that there are many situations that might leave an idiot thinking “now who could have ever guessed that would happen?” while the smarter person would have seen where things were leading and changed their course to avoid the negative consequences.
An example I remember from the Darwin Awards: A drunk snowmobiler died after crashing into a tree while speeding at night without a helmet. The irony: not only did he crash into a tree with a sign posted warning people about snowmobiling safely, he was one of the volunteer rescue workers who put the signs up, because others had died in similar crashes. Had he been smarter, there would be no accident for us to appreciate the irony of.
“How to drive fast on drugs, while getting your wing-wang squeezed; and not spill your drink!”
Fortunately, it can be found on the web.
My how things change in 25 years.
Sigene–going back to his grown up job, sigh
P.J. said that? How ironic!
This is GQ territory? Me stupid?
I gave my interpretation in a thread where Unclebeer brought it up: I said something like, “I love this quote, and my politics are directly opposite O’Rourke’s, ironically!”
There’s nothing at all ironic about that, of course: just because our politics are opposite has nothing to do with whether I should find him funny, and only a stupid person would think so.
Someone else almost came in and said something like, “Heh, here’s O’Rourke talking about how stupid people find irony everywhere, and Daniel stupidly finds irony here! Talk about your ironies.” Which, of course, would have been stupid of them, since I was just making a joke: they’d be finding irony only because they weren’t smart enough to realize that I was foolin around.
Sadly, they spring my trap and escaped :).
To put it more formally, there’s the idea that thought progresses through thesis (an idea), antithesis (the opposite of the idea, or an argument against the idea), and synthesis (the reconciliation of the idea and the argument against it into a novel idea). I think a lot of people get stuck at the antithesis idea: they see two things which seem fairly well balanced with each other but that each seem to argue against the other’s validity.
A guy dies in a snowmobile accident? Thesis. He put up a sign warning against snowmobile accidents? Antithesis.
If you don’t move further, the tension between these two ideas looks like irony. But you can move to the synthesis: snowmobilers will be the ones who put up signs on snowmobile routes, of course, and there’s nothing to guarantee that they’ll obey the signs.
This isn’t a great example, but you get the idea, I hope: it’s foolish to look at a superficial contradiction and declare it an irony without exploring more deeply.
Daniel
Just for the record, I hope I’m not the only one to have some difficulty sorting out the various degrees and types of Irony. Until recent years I had regarded Sarcasm as the extension of Irony that got (shall we say) malicious, where Irony itself was rather mild.
Whatever noun makes Sardonic into a noun is still further along towards “mean-spirited” on the Irony scale.
Would somebody like to try a cheapo gradation of these and other relevant terms, without sending me off to a dictionary or Wikipedia page?
From a political standpoint, O’Rourke porobably meant something like this:
Governments take all kinds of actions, with the best and noblest of intentions, and these actions often have disastrous effects.
Occasionally, some conservatives who supported the war in Iraq may look at the current situation and think, “How ironic that we went in there to make things better, and we may actually have made things worse.”
Or some liberals may look at America’s inner cities and think, “Wow, the War on Poverty was supposed to make things better for the poor, but it may actually have made things worse.”
How ironic!
Unless you were a cynic all along, who never believed the government had the smarts or the power to accomplish the great tasks it took on, and was stupid to try in the first place.
What LHoD said. The word *ironic *is way overused. Gift of the Magi is not ironic; it’s the kind of thing that happens if you have only one possession each and don’t communicate well.
*Ironic *is especially overused in TV news coverage. Watch a half-hour local news show, and I bet you something is described as ironic. Perhaps several things.
Reminds me of an observation I read in a book once: “There are no contradictions - check your assumptions.”
Ayn Rand’s ATLAS SHRUGGED?
I’ll take a shot. First, irony is used in several different contexts; for example, Socratic irony (assuming a pose of ignorance in order to reveal wisdom; this is the origin of the actual word itself, from the Greek for ‘feigned ignorance’) is something different than literary irony (the use of words to express meanings contrary to their literal definitions) and dramatic irony (the reasonable development of a situation contrary to what is normally expected from action in previous scenes), and each of these could likely be classified further. So it’s understandable the concept itself is fraught with ambiguity.
The underlying idea of irony is contrast (often opposite contrast) between traditional expression (speech, storytelling, appearances, etc.) and the actual circumstance. This is often confused with humor; they are similar in that humor often derives from a situation in which the unexpected (e.g. the punchline in a joke) or unusual (e.g. Athenian women ruling over men in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata), but humor is more about the absurdity of the reversal, whereas irony is perceived as a **natural outcome ** of our use of language, storytelling, etc. when applied to real events.
To apply this to P.J. O’Rourke’s quote, irony relies on the unexpected, but one can argue that–since irony is a natural outcome of our use of language–with enough intelligence a person should recognize the inevitability of things that are commonly labeled ironic. Here’s a good example: Someone seeing a Twilight Zone episode for the first time would rightly label the usual “twist” ending as ironic, but after viewing 100+ episodes, most of us are familiar enough with the technique of Rod Serling’s storytelling to look for clues during the story that will alert us in advance of the twist ending; the ending then will not be a surprise, and so can’t be ironic (now, occasionally an episode may still surprise us, but we’d be more likely to label that twist as absurd or humorous rather than ironic if we felt it wasn’t supported by the preceding storyline.
BTW, anyone who get’s their definition of ironic from that idiotic Alanis Morrisette song gets what they deserve:)
Sarcasm and irony are very different. Irony is very rare, it requires unusual circumstances with links to the people involved for something to have a chance of being ironic.
The weatherman says it will rain, I forgot my umbrella, and got wet. != Ironic
The weatherman says it will rain, the weatherman forgets his umbrella, the weatherman get’s wet. = Slightly ironic.
The weatherman says there will be a storm, the weatherman remembers his umbrella, I forgot my umbrella, I meet the weatherman who gives me his umbrella, I stay dry, the weatherman gets wet, then the umbrella is hit by lightning killing me. = Ironic.
If you see irony very frequently, it is almost certain you don’t really know what irony is and so are somewhat stupid for not knowing what irony is c.f. Alana Morissette
Nice work and thanks, CJJ* and Bippy the Beardless.
That’s a repeated point in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Yeah, it’s simple: 75% of what people think is ironic not only isn’t ironic, it’s actually inevitable.
Two points: First off, O’Rourke’s point seems pretty simple to me: a stupid person may ascribe something he doesn’t understand to irony. A smarter person will understand the underlying logic and connections that render a complex situation fully comprehensible and irony free.
Second, irony has more than one shade of meaning (look it up). Many of the examples given above are only NOT ironic in the sense that they are not covered by one particular shade of the definition of irony. But some of them are, in fact, covered by other shades of the definition.
“Irony” is overused and misused. But there’s a weird kind of bandwagon nowadays where people love to jump on any use of the word and declare it incorrect, almost by default. Those bandwagoneers are just as often wrong as the ones who misuse the word itself.
When trying to interpret a turn of phrase that is confusing but seems vaguely profound it is always important to remember that the medium is the message.