Rhetorically Speaking 3: Irony

In Search of Irony

A couple of books I’m reading at the moment have made references to “ironic t-shirts”. This got me to thinking, what exactly is an ironic t-shirt and for that matter, what exactly is irony.

It turns out that there are three main types of irony...

Verbal Irony

This is when you say something while implying something else. For example if there's a massive rainstorm outside and you say “What lovely weather we’re having!”. You are being ironic.

Dramatic Irony

When the readers or viewers are aware of a character’s situation and the characters themselves aren’t this is dramatic irony. In “Romeo and Juliet”, for example, Romeo is distraught because he thinks that Juliet is dead. He then kills himself. We as readers know that Juliet is not in fact dead, so that’s dramatic irony.

Situational Irony

Ah, my favourite type of irony. This is when a situation leads to results that would not normally be expected. Classic example

President Reagan was struck by a bullet that bounced off the presidential car. This is ironic because the car was bullet-proof (and probably bomb and missile proof too) and in normal circumstances would protect the president from bullets.

Irony in Popular Culture

In my quest for examples of irony I was led to popular culture and this sketch from Blackadder

Blackadder: Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?
Baldrick: Yes, it's like goldy and bronzy only it's made out of iron.

Ok, this was just a simple play on words, but amusing nevertheless.

Apparently Americans “just don’t get irony”. Does this extend to Canadians too? Perhaps. You would think that Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic” would be a great place to find some ironic scenarios. You’d be wrong. As Matt Sturge points out in this article most of what she mentions in the song is just bad luck/unfortunate timing:

Attempts at describing irony: 11
Successful attempts: 2.5

Irish comedian Ed Byrne showed he really knows what irony is all about: "The only ironic thing about that song is it's called 'Ironic' and it's written by a woman who doesn't know what irony is. That's quite ironic."

Anyway, back to those elusive ironic t-shirts. Ordinary t-shirts may turn out to be ironic if worn in the right situation. Take for example these ironic t-shirts to get arrested in. Strictly speaking artistic irony is when an artistic work refers back to earlier art.

My search for ironic t-shirts led me to this design, "Pop Art is Dead". Maybe this is the ultimate in ironic t-shirt design? The t-shirt is ironic in the artistic sense (referring to the pop art style) and situationally ironic (because it’s using pop art imagery while at the same time saying it’s dead). So it seems that not only is pop art still very much alive, but irony is helping to keep it that way.

Life's a laugh and death's a joke

Having lived in England for about two years I must have been accused hundreds of times of not understanding the famous English sense of humour. It's true to some extent, however, it's mostly caused by cultural differences between England and Poland. The English sense of humour is not considered to be a positive sense of humour as it involves mockery, sarcasm and cynicism. Don't be offended, they will say worse things to you the longer have known you for and the more comfortable they feel in your company, so just accept it. Whereas, in other cultures there are certain situations in which jokes are out of place, the humour in England is constant. "Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true". Although I can't see much fun in insulting each other for laughs there is a part of English humour that I do find highly amusing. I love watching the English talk and how they try so hard to avoiding sounding enthuisiastic. This is based on constant under-statement. A beautiful half-naked model in your bedroom is "not bad" and a serial killer is "not a very nice person". Ok, that's enough for now, I must watch Mr Bean on TV.