Maybe George Carlin.
The first example of irony that springs to my mind is Paxil, the anti-anxiety drug marketed for social anxiety that also has the side effect of sexual dysfunction.
It helps guys using it to finally take part in the social situations that can lead to sex, but also renders some of those guys unable to “close the deal” anyway.
That’s pretty damn ironic.
Senator Strom Thurmond who built his career on defending racial segregation, having a mixed race, out of wedlock “love child” with a 16 year old black housekeeper (at the time) . That’s irony (among other things).
Strom’s mulatto daughter was such an open secret among black folks in South Carolina for decades-- my grandmother was an undergrad with Strom’s daughter – I’d have to protest this is more simple lying and hypocrisy than irony.
This is how I defined it in a story I wrote for Halloween. The following conversation takes place between siblings, the older 15, the younger 11.
I once wrote a whole term paper on irony for a Philosophy of Language class. Based on my research, I had to say in my conclusion that there doesn’t seem to be any real consensus on what constitutes irony and that the term seems to be in a transitory state.
Since it was a Philosophy of Language course, I didn’t even get into what real-life or dramatic events might be considered ironic, just how it applies to spoken or written communication. Some of my sources indicated that in Ancient Greece, “irony” could just mean “lying”. This is no longer the case. Usually when people use irony they aren’t actually trying to fool their audience. They want to have their true meaning understood.
I’ll see if I can dig up my old paper later and see what brilliant insights I had on the topic, but I think the Braund quote in the OP means something like “Irony is a way of pointing out that something is negative by speaking of it in a positive way.”
i feel that would be predestiny or something, and it would be more ironic as it is. (since if anything happened to the plane it would prove his point?)
When the only living person whose blood is needed to break an ancient Aztec Curse for a Pirate Crew Of The Damned ™ is killed by sending
The Curse Breaker to the bottom of the ocean.
That’s what you call ‘Ironic’.
This would be an excellent story for a movie…
That’s about where I fall. It makes irony seem to me to be a pretty useless word.
This definition provides an essential ingredient to irony, but it’s not sufficient. Irony is an incongruity that triggers an “How about that?” or “Hmmm” response in you. An obvious example is a young health guru who drops dead from a heart attack. In the gift example cited above, that’s not really ironic since there is no incongruity. Now if the gift exchange was like the plot in the O Henry classic, The Gift of the Magi, then you have irony. In that story, a man and woman had limited funds to buy each other a gift. The man’s prized possession is his watch; the woman’s her long hair. So, independently, the man sells his watch to buy the woman a beautiful set of combs, and the woman sells her hair to buy the man a fob chain. The incongruity comes from each receiving a gift that cost each other the reasons for the gifts.
The more I read this thread, the more I think that the kernel of what makes irony is inverse appropriateness of the present circumstance to the prior situation.
Yesterday I heard someone on BBC radio say “The opera singer Maria Callas only made one film in her life - ironically, she didn’t sing a note in the movie”. Is this actually ironic? Only if the movie were about the life of a great opera singer - then the present circumstance of her not singing would be inversely appropriate to the prior situation of her being a great opera singer.
Drowning in a small swimming pool is inversely appropriate to the situation of being surrounded by the ocean. Being in a traffic jam when you’re already late is only ironic if your prior situation pertains to traffic flow.
(I stand corrected about sarcasm.)
Thanks, I think this is an important element to the discussion. When Socrates was accused of irony, as I mentioned above, he was actually being accused of dissembling. Can you expand on what you mean by the term ‘irony’ being in a transitory state? From what to what?
I actually think that would make sense. Unfortunately, that’s not what she’s trying to prove. The poet she’s talking about, Juvenal, did that, to a certain extent, in his early career. He also mixed that with straightforward anger and condemnation. But then, in the poems she’s talking about, he appears, suddenly, calmer, reasonable, more positive. Now, if his message was the same as in the first poems, still completely condemnatory, I can see how she would say that (and in fact, this is a position I could agree with for the poems in question). But she goes on to claim the the ‘ironic’ message is actually more positive. Hmm.
Now, here’s something we can all agree as being ironic. Right? (Right?) Can we build a working definition from this sort of example?
Cheers,
Daphne
[Bigging myself up] I reckon my definition fits perfectly.
Prior situation: he loved his watch, she loved her hair.
Present circumstance: he has no watch; she has no hair.
Inverse appropriateness: her gift to him pertains to his now non-existent watch; his gift to her pertains to her now non-existent hair.
[/BMU]
When you drink water from a rusty bucket, and the water tastes all irony. That’s what irony is. 
To what, I don’t know. However, I think the fact that we’re even having this discussion indicates that older definitions like “speech where the intended meaning is different from, and often opposite to, the literal meaning” isn’t cutting it anymore.
I’m not sure when people began looking at real-life situations, as opposed to speech or dramatic events, as being ironic. I think that may be behind some shifting in the word’s meaning, though. As you pointed about above, there’s a problem of perspective when we’re talking about real life. When we leave the realm of verbal and dramatic irony, it no longer makes sense to talk about the “intended message”…unless you want to drag religion into it!
Well, maybe it could be. Since I haven’t read the article and I’m not familiar with Juvenal or his poems I’m not sure what she’s really getting at, but I can make a guess. To use a lighthearted example, let’s consider the subject of B-movies. I could write a review rightfully blasting a B-movie for being dreck, or I could write an ironic review “praising” it. “The effects were terrible. The UFO was obviously a hubcab dangling from a piece of string” vs. “You can hardly even see the strings holding up the UFO, which was ingeniously constructed from a common hubcap by the brilliant prop designers!”
In both cases I’m criticizing the movie. I think the ironic review even seems a bit meaner than the straightforward one. Yet I think the ironic review also suggests that the movie might be campy Mystery Science Theater 3000 entertainment for some viewers. This could be considered a more positive message than just saying that the movie was lousy. Or, if the subject is more serious than a bad flick, we could say that a horrible thing you can make fun of must not be quite as bad as a thing so horrible that there’s no way to laugh at it.
If she wasn’t getting at something along those lines, then I’ve got no clue!
I think that’s another way of saying “incongruity”. But I don’t think that’s sufficient. Let’s say a town has just experienced a bunch of horrible homicides from people shooting each other up. Prior to this, the town has been completely tranquil with no murders for decades. You can say that the present circumstance is as inappropriate for the prior situation as you can get, but I don’t see any irony here. Now if the town had just enacted a strict gun control law, then you could make a case for irony. So it’s incongruity with a twist.
that is a sarcastic review.
A kindred spirit. My doctoral dissertation was a critique of critical discourse analysis. Here’s a taster - just in case it never gets published(!), which also happens to include ‘ironic’:
Example:
I was rummaging around in a closet, trying to find something on the top shelf.
Me: “OWWW!!!”
Ex: “What? What’d you do?”
Me: “Oh, the irony. I dropped a helment on my head!”
See? I accidentally injured my head with an object whose entire existance is designed to protect my head from accidental injury. If a book had fallen off the top shelf onto my head, it wouldn’t have been ironic, just painful. But the helment, the very thing you wear to prevent head injury…
What the hell? ‘Helmet’. I previewed and everything. And I still really wanna go and stick an ‘n’ in there. What’s wrong with me???
/Crayons… copy editor.