by Jon Winokur
Cadets entering West Point step into an irony-free zone, a place where sarcasm has been fought to a standstill. And an irony-free zone turns out to be an immense relief for human beings: a relief not to have to worry about sounding foolish or whether somebody’s statement has a subtext; a relief to accept the apparent meaning and move on.
—David Lipsky, Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point (2003)
Utah will never, ever be ironic.
Irony deficiency is directly proportional to the strength of the political commitment or religious fervor. True believers of all persuasions are irony-deficient:
The only people who take the Bible literally are fundamentalists and atheists.
—Andy Kindler, standup routine
Brutal dictators are irony-deficient—take Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-il, and Saddam Hussein, a world-class vulgarian whose art collection consisted of kitsch paintings displayed unironically.
Totalitarian regimes and theocracies are irony-deficient, of course, but so are democracies, where, though politicians are ironic in the sense that they’re congenital dissemblers, it is unwise for them to consciously commit irony, even in the U.K.:
A typical painting from Saddam Hussein’s art collection
(AP Photo/John Moore)
The first thing a fledgling MP should be told on arrival at Westminster is never indulge in irony.
It may sound fine in the Commons, accompanied by nods and winks, but when you read it in Hansard in the cold light of the following day, it simply looks barmy and, like statements made to the police, may be used against you as evidence.
A cautionary tale: Chris Patten, the former Bath MP, when he was Environment Secretary, listened patiently to a Labour Member describing his party’s alternative to the Council Tax.
At the end of this, Mr. Patten exclaimed, his voice loaded with sarcasm: “I’m gobsmacked!” [utterly astonished, astounded] which was meant to mean “I am not at all gobsmacked.”
Too late! The words “I’m gobsmacked!” were splashed all over the following day’s papers. And there is nothing more pathetic than a politician whimpering afterwards: “But I was being ironic.”
The message clearly has not got through to the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. When asked whether he was considering retiring, he said: “I keep going. It’s still better than working for a living.” Careful, John! The Tories could nail you for this. But then, on second thoughts, perhaps the man was not trying to be ironic, after all.…
—Europe Intelligence Wire, July 21, 2004
META-IRONY
Irony that refers to the ironies associated with irony. For example, to offer as an instance of irony the fact that Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig’s disease is either to practice meta-irony, or to be incredibly obtuse.
It’s impossible to write or read about irony without either becoming ironic, falling victim to irony, or both. Schlegel calls this effect “Unverstandlichkeit,” the impossibility of understanding. Kierkegaard provides us with a metaphor: Irony, like the greedy witch from a Danish fairy tale, must eventually devour even its own stomach.
—Jennifer Thompson, “Irony: a Few Simple Definitions,” Teachers’ Resource Web
Irony can be pretty damned ironic.
—William Shatner as Commander Buck Murdock, Airplane II: The Sequel (1982, screenplay by Ken Finkleman)
While the author is self-conscious about being self-referential, he is also knowing about that self-conscious self-referentiality. Further, and if you’re one of those people who can tell what’s going to happen before it actually happens, you’ve predicted the next element here: He also plans to be clearly, obviously aware of his knowingness about his self-consciousness of self-referentiality. Further, he is fully cognizant, way ahead of you, in terms of knowing about and fully admitting the gimmickry inherent in all this, and will preempt your claim of the book’s irrelevance due to said gimmickry by saying that the gimmickry is simply a device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story, which is both too black and blinding to look at.
—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)
“How ironic is that?” isn’t really a question, it’s a meta-ironic statement; it doesn’t seek an answer, it provides one, that is, “It’s very ironic.”
Wah, wah, wah, waahhhh, the muted trumpet notes that punctuated rare ironic moments on 1950s television, were to sitcom irony what canned laughter is to sitcom comedy. The twenty-first-century meta-ironist might voice it to call attention to an ironic moment in everyday life:
Civilian:
I bought a suit with two pairs of pants and burned a hole in the jacket!
Meta-ironist:
Wah, wah, wah, waahhhh …
MORISSETTIAN IRONY
Irony based on a misapprehension of irony, that is, no irony at all. Named for pop singer Alanis Morissette, whose hit single “Ironic” mislabels coincidence and inconvenience as irony.
ORWELLIAN IRONY
Self-contradictory or grossly false propaganda used by a government to deceive and manipulate the public. The name derives from George Orwell, in whose dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) the world is dominated by three perpetually warring superpowers, one of which is Oceania, a totalitarian state ruled by Big Brother where “thoughtcrimes” are punishable by death and “Newspeak” and “Doublethink” replace logic and truth. Three slogans promulgated by the “Ministry of Truth” are repeated constantly and displayed everywhere:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The phrase “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it,” originally attributed to an American general in Vietnam, is often invoked as classic Orwellian irony. Other examples: The Japanese Family Leave Act of 1942, mandating the arrest and imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens; the B-36 Peacemaker nuclear bomber; and the Atoms for Peace program, which enabled the worldwide spread of fissionable material, eventually to such regimes as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, one of the most repressive dictatorships in history.
As far as I can tell, the Clear Skies Initiative is basically to clear the skies of birds.
—Al Franken in a speech at Jimmy Carter Library, November 30, 2005
POSTMODERN IRONY
Postmodern irony is allusive, multilayered, preemptive, cynical, and above all, nihilistic. It assumes that everything is subjective and nothing means what it says. It’s a sneering, world-weary, bad irony, a mentality that condemns before it can be condemned, preferring cleverness to sincerity and quotation to originality. Postmodern irony rejects tradition, but offers nothing in its place.
Postmodern irony first appeared in postmodern fiction, which began, according to the postmodern novelist David Foster Wallace, with a “rehabilitative agenda,” that is, as an ironic weapon against hypocrisy. But the irony quickly devolved into a hip mode of social discourse among the young and the marginalized—a way of looking cool, a mechanism for avoiding important issues and a substitute for civic, religious, and moral values.
The ironic individual practices a style of speech and behavior that avoids all appearance of naïveté—of naïve devotion, belief, or hope. He subtly protests the inadequacy of the things he says, the gestures he makes, the acts he performs. By the inflection of his voice, the expression of his face, and the motion of his body, he signals that he is aware of all the ways he may be thought silly or jejune, and that he might even think so himself. His wariness becomes a mistrust of language itself. He disowns his own words.
—Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (1999)
Postmodern agenda: The peep show is the art form; the voyeur is the protagonist; the goal is excitement from a safe distance; the alibi is that it’s all ironic.
—Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Fourteenth Selection (1994)
Pity poor irony. Irony used to be
a rebellious stance, a way of looking at an orderly world through a cracked mirror, a way of busting balloons filled with pompous hot air. But what does one do when irony becomes the norm? When there is no orderly world to mock? When everyone wants to be Groucho and no one is willing to play Margaret Dumont? You end up with a world in which everyone wants to be the hippest one in the room, in which comedy becomes so superior and distant it seldom stoops to being funny. A world in which irreverence itself becomes meaningless, because nothing is revered. A world like the one we’re in now.
—Phoef Sutton, San Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 2000
ROMANTIC IRONY
A theory posited by the German philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) based on the assumption that irony inheres in the very fact of being an artist, and that ambivalence is the only viable stance in a paradoxical world. (The name derives from roman, the French word for “novel.”) Sometimes called philosophical irony, it seeks to triangulate the truth by assuming a variety of mutually exclusive points of view. The novelist employing romantic irony stays detached, noncommittal, nonjudgmental, sometimes even revealing himself as the creator of a literary illusion.
The romantic-irony theory greatly influenced the English Romantic poets, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is written from two perspectives: the poem’s narrative itself, plus a running commentary. Henry Fielding often interrupts the storyline to comment on the action in Joseph Andrews, as does Jonathan Swift in A Tale of a Tub, as does Bugs Bunny when he faces the audience and asks, “Ironic, ain’t it?” Philip Roth’s seriocomic, metafictional, multinarrational, double-self-contradictory fiction may be the ultimate manifestation of romantic irony.
The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer.
—Ian McEwan, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, edited by Vendela Vida (2005)
Romantic Irony [is] the irony of the fully conscious artist whose art is the ironical presentation of the ironic position of the fully conscious artist. The artist is in an ironic position for several reasons: In order to write well he must be both creative and critical, subjective and objective, enthusiastic and realistic, emotional and rational, unconsciously inspired and a conscious artist; his work purports to be about the world and yet is fiction; he feels an obligation to give a true or complete account of reality but he knows this is impossible, reality being incomprehensibly vast, full of contradictions, and in a continual state of becoming, so that even a true account would be immediately falsified as soon as it was completed. The only possibility for a real artist is to stand apart from his work and at the same time incorporate this awareness of his ironic position into the work itself and so create something which will, if a novel, not simply be a story but rather the telling of a story complete with the author and the narrating, the reader and the reading, the style and the choosing of the style, the fiction and its distance from fact, so that we shall regard it as being both art and life.
—D. C. Muecke, Irony (1970)
SOCRATIC IRONY
Sometimes called “dialectical irony,” Socratic irony is a strategy for refuting dogma. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates assumes the role of eiron, a sly dissembler who feigns naïveté by asking seemingly foolish questions that slowly but surely trap his interlocutors by their own admissions.
Socratic irony was a profession of ignorance. What Socrates represented as an ignorance and a weakness in himself was in fact a non-committal attitude toward any dogma, however accepted or imposing, that had not been carried back to and shown to be based on first principles. The two parties in his audience were, first, the dogmatists moved by pity or contempt to enlighten this ignorance, and secondly, those who knew their Socrates and set themselves to watch the familiar game in which learning should be turned inside out by simplicity.
—H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, second edition, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers (1965)
Some go so far as to say that Socrates’ ironic personality inaugurated a peculiarly Western sensibility. His irony, or his capacity not to accept everyday values and concepts but live in a state of perpetual question, is the birth of philosophy, ethics, and consciousness.
—Claire Colebrook, Irony: The New Critical Idiom (2004)
UNDERSTATEMENT
Understatement can border on irony, as when Mark Twain writes to a correspondent, “the report of my death was an exaggeration”; or when, in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy says, upon suddenly finding herself amid Technicolored splendor, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”; or when Swift writes in A Tale of a Tub (1699): “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.” Extreme case of ironic understatement: Emperor Hirohito ruled Japan as a living god until August 14, 1945, when, with his cities destroyed by American bombs, his armies vanquished, and his nation’s industrial capacity obliterated, he addressed his subjects on the radio to announce Japan’s surrender:
Indeed, we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to insure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.
But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone—the gallant fighting of our military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the State, and the devoted service of our 100,000,000 people—the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest. [emphasis added]
Japan’s Empress Nagako displayed a similar flair for understatement when she wrote in a letter a few weeks later, “Unfortunately, the B-29 is a splendid plane.”
VERBAL IRONY (AKA RHETORICAL IRONY)
The most common form of irony, it’s the practice of saying one thing but meaning the opposite with the intent of being understood as meaning the opposite, as in, “Nice weather we’re having” on a rainy day or, “With all due respect,” when none is due.
People frequently use a simple form of verbal irony to forge bonds with a new acquaintance. The listener is pleased to get the joke, however simple, and the speaker is pleased to have made it, and to have pleased the listener.
—Jennifer Thompson, “Irony: A Few Simple Definitions,” Teachers’ Resource Web
VILRONY
According to the Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com), this form of irony has two distinct meanings: “1. The act of tricking someone into having sex with you just so that you can do something harmful to them. He committed vilrony when he handcuffed his girlfriend in a sexual way, but then proceeded to steal her money and leave her handcuffed to the chair. 2. Vinyl records purchased out of irony. Ever seen the Play It Again LP by the Alan Gardiner Accordion Band? Boy, that’s a great piece of vilrony.”
VISUAL IRONY
(Photo by Jon Winokur)
In visual irony, an image or object contradicts itself, either intentionally (for example, flames painted on a minivan) or accidentally, as in a 1937 Margaret Bourke-White photograph ostensibly showing a Depression Era breadline ironically juxtaposed with a billboard touting American prosperity. Bonus irony: In fact, the people are not welfare recipients, but victims of a flood.
(Getty Images/Margaret Bourke-White)
Sometimes an image combines with circumstances to produce visual irony, as in the case of the famous photo of a smiling Harry S. Truman holding up the Chicago Daily Tribune with the headline, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. It is one of the most iconic—and ironic—images in American political history.
The headline is wrong, of course. Truman won the 1948 presidential election over New York’s Governor Thomas E. Dewey by 4 percent of the
vote, despite public opinion surveys predicting a landslide for Dewey. Truman, who became President when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in office in April of 1945, had been under constant attack from the press, Republicans, and even fellow Democrats for his performance in office. His support of civil rights legislation and tough stance against Communism had splintered the Democratic Party, and as a result, his 1948 presidential campaign was underfunded. With Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket and Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party threatening to siphon off Democratic votes, The New York Times declared Dewey’s election a “foregone conclusion,” and a Life magazine cover ran Dewey’s picture over the caption, “The Next President of the United States.” Truman’s victory was thus a huge embarrassment for the press (especially for the Chicago Daily Tribune) and a fiasco for the emerging public polling industry. Asked to comment, a jubilant Truman said, “This is for the books.”
Harry Truman after winning the presidency, holding the newspaper that predicted his defeat
(AP Photo/Byron Rollins)
Bonus irony 1: The late swing in voter sentiment that tipped the election to Truman probably resulted from poll results favoring Dewey, which made Republicans overconfident but energized Democrats, who intensified last-minute efforts to get their voters to the polls.
Bonus irony 2: In 1999, computer company Dell used a doctored version of the Truman photo in an ad that ran in newspapers across the country. Truman is still seen holding the paper, but the headline is altered to read: DELL LOWERS PRICES. Thus in the context of the image, the headline implies the opposite, that is, that Dell has raised prices—clearly the contrary of what the ad was meant to convey.
At the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia, after losing the presidential nomination to what he called a Bush-financed “Death Star,” Senator John McCain was brought onstage to the strains of the “Theme from Star Wars” and proceeded to endorse his former nemesis “with a smile so tight you could almost hear the enamel cracking,” according to the satirist Will Durst.