I’ve always avoided using the word ‘ironic’ because I’m worried about using it incorrectly. I was listening to ‘Ironic’ by Alanis Morrisette and remembered she had been called out for not understanding what ironic meant. I find most explanations to be confusing and so I figured I’d ask here.
In: Other
Hoo boy.
Okay, so, it really kind of depends on who you ask as to whether the situations described by Alanis Morrisette are or are not ironic, because there is some wiggle-room in the definitions and how they’re used.
In general, irony is a situation where what you see, hear, read, or intuit are different from the reality of the situation.
Depending on who you ask, there are 3 or 4 different main types of irony. Sometimes the last two are rolled into one, but I think there’s enough of a difference between them to split them up.
1) **Verbal Irony**: Verbal irony is for when a person (or a character) says something that implies the opposite of what the words they’re saying mean in a vacuum. This is sometimes confused/conflated with sarcasm; the difference is that sarcasm is generally mean and snide. A few examples of verbal irony:
* If you look out the window and see clouds and rain, and say “What a beautiful day outside!”
* Your friend runs to the bus stop just barely making it and as you get on the bus with him you say “Aah, on time as always” with a smile
* Your friends ask you about a politician that they know you hate, and you say something like “Oh yeah, he makes great decisions.”
Something that would be classed as sarcasm rather than irony:
* A professional rival swoops in on a sale and you say something like “How nice of you to take the commission on the last 10 minutes of that 2 hour sale.” with the clear connotation/tone that you think he’s an asshole for doing that.
2) **Dramatic Irony** is a situation that exists solely in a fictional work, and is a situation where a character’s actions or words are opposed to what we know is the reality of the situation. Some examples that aren’t from any particular fiction:
* A character who has been shown to be selling out the heroes gives the main character a glass of water and the hero says “Thanks, you’re always such a great guy.”
* The hero is shown putting on a bulletproof vest in his suit-up montage, and in the climactic showdown the villain shoots him in the chest, which knocks the hero flat. The villain turns around and starts boasting about killing the hero.
* The protagonist’s wife is shown having an affair with another character; in a later scene the protagonist is talking with the other guy and says “You’re such a good friend, I know I can trust you when it counts.”
This is different from verbal irony because it relies on knowledge we have that the character speaking or acting does not have. For instance: if in the last example, there’s a scene in between where the protagonist discovers the affair, his statement would be verbal irony, since it’s not us knowing that he’s being played, but him “playing along” and making that statement knowing the irony of it.
3) **Situational Irony** is when a situation defies what logic would dictate to be the most obvious outcome. The best example I’ve heard of this is the idea of Jeff Bezos buying a lottery ticket and winning the jackpot of a million dollars; not only is the idea of such a rich man buying a lottery ticket kind of absurd, but the fact that he wins is just absurd and in a way, unfair (since it would be much more of a benefit to someone without hundreds of billions of dollars in money and assets). This also borders on…
4) **Cosmological Irony** This is situational irony taken to an extreme that makes you think “Someone involved in this pissed off a higher power” and is both tragic and entirely unlikely. This is the sort of irony that was often employed in the ancient Greek Tragedies; for the best example look at the case of the father of Oedipus in *Oedipus Rex* – Oedipus’ father, the king of a nation, visits an oracle who tells him that his son is destined to kill him, usurp his throne, and impregnate his queen (the boy’s own mother); the king, fearing this, has his son set to be executed as an infant. I don’t remember if it was the king or a servant who couldn’t do it, but whoever couldn’t bear to behead an infant instead pierced the Achilles tendons of his feet and bound them together so that he would starve or be eaten by wolves; however, the boy is found by a farmer, raised back to health, and he goes on to become a leader who conquers many states, including the one formerly belonging to his father, who he kills, and he then marries the queen, who is his own mother. Not only was this not the result you would expect from leaving an infant to die, but the very situation that the father was trying to avoid.
Most of the situations that Alanis Morisette refers to in “Ironic” are mild examples of situational irony. Key example being that “A free ride when you’ve already paid” is a similar situation to the above example of Jeff Bezos winning a million dollars.
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