An example I found that is meant to illustrate the difference between mere unfortunate happenstance and actual irony, is this one:
* **Accident/Conincidence:** If a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck, he is the victim of an accident.
* **Poetic coincidence:** If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence.
* **Irony:** But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony.
As I understand it, irony is about opposites. So situational irony is about the opposition from what you’d expect occurring. How is the latter situation the opposite of what was expected to happen? It seems like it’s just something random and wildly different from what was expected, albeit with this undercurrent of dark, twisted humor.
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Irony is when a persons intended meaning is at odds with the plainly stated words. An example would be Jonathan Swift’s “A modest proposal” where he wrote an essay suggesting that to alleviate the famine in Ireland the Irish people should eat babies. His point was to highlight how brutal the famine was and how many infants and children were dying of it and to call out how heartless and unsympathetic a lot of people in England were being to the mass suffering.
Other examples include sarcasm – a case where it’s immediately obvious you mean the opposite of what you’re saying, and ironic names – eg an enormous dude getting a nickname like “tiny”.
Irony is intentional.
Situational Irony is when the outcome of an event is unexpected in some way that connects the subjects to the event in the opposite way from what you’d expect – for example a fire station burning down, but is often interpreted to include weird coincidences as well.
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