I concur with what toadspittle said about American vs. British delivery. I’d add that when I was an exchange student in Spain, most of my American friends had precisely the same complaint about Spanish people that Brits have about Americans; I suspect that the real problem is that Spaniards aren’t familiar with the facial expressions or inflection Americans typically use to communicate irony.
Willass ; quite a few of us do get irony. And enjoy it immensely. The people that don’t, welll…what can I say? Irony takes effort. It’s an acquired taste.
You tell me. Laura Croft/Tombraider grossed through the roof. I left it in the middle of the damn film, tired of waiting for SOMETHING to happen. Dogma, a GREAT ironic comedy, was shunned & totally misunderstood. Mil Millington…I quote his stuff, and even started a thread. People posting from the US didn’t get him at all. Found it insulting. ITS A JOKE!! FUNNY HAHA!!
Sometimes we take the trait of honesty to extremes. You’re saying it. You must mean it. Why else would you say it? I think that may have a lot to do with it. That, and a lot of people are just to lazy to make the effort to understand it. Why read a book? The movie will be out soon if it’s good enough. Why enjoy a good satire, when physical comedy is so much easier? Besides, nobody got shot. It can’t be any good.
No, I don’t think it’s a pun at all. Using harpy as a metaphorical description of his wife as a bird of prey isn’t using a different meaning of the same word or sound alike phrase which is a basis of a pun.
“A bun is the lowest form of wheat” is a pun. Well maybe a meta-pun.
Trust me when I say that everybody in America knows about the inaccuracies in that song. It was major stand-up comedy fodder for several years. We know, OK? Popular American humor MIGHT - and I stress MIGHT - be less ironic than popular European humor, but there’s lots of ironic humor to be found.
It’s a lot more pun than irony. Your joke is playing off the word harpy, simultaneously using the slang version for a nasty woman while at the same time evoking the classical version of its appearance. Pretty pun-like to me.
I think irony would be buying a car rated highest by Consumer Reports in terms of safety features and then dying after crashing into an Edsel, while the driver of that car walks away without a scratch or dent.
Maybe not funny, though. I guess it depends on which car you were in.
You assume Americans do not get irony, and in attempting to verify this assumption, your first impulse is to post this potshot on a board that is comprised mostly of Americans?