by Jon Winokur
The ironic philosopher reflects with a smile that Sir Walter Raleigh is more safely enshrined in the memory of mankind because he set his cloak for the Virgin Queen to walk on than because he carried the English name to undiscovered countries.
—W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (1919)
Stock car driver Edward Glenn “Fireball” Roberts (1931–1964) died in a fiery wreck during the World 600 in Charlotte, North Carolina, when his car burst into flames after hitting the inside wall. Bonus irony: Roberts’s nickname derived not from his driving style but from his years as a hard-throwing sandlot pitcher.
During the filming of an episode of TV’s Homicide: Life on the Street, a fleeing shoplifter blundered onto the set, saw the show’s actors with their guns drawn, dropped the loot, and surrendered to them, thinking they were actual policemen. Bonus irony: In a subsequent episode, two homicide detectives encounter the crew of a TV show called Homicide, complete with Barry Levinson, who exclaims, “It’s the real Homicide unit!”
In Frederica, Delaware, the suicide of a woman who hanged herself from a tree went unreported for hours because passersby thought the body was a Halloween decoration.
When a construction crew began repairing the decaying stone floor of the sculpture garden at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, workers cordoned off an adjacent bas-relief with a red velvet rope and covered it in burlap. After a gust of wind loosened the covering and exposed a small portion of the sculpture, museumgoers were heard speculating on the artist’s intent in providing only partial access to the work and about the symbolism of burlap juxtaposed with velvet.
Among the most damning evidence at Robert Blake’s trial for the murder of his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley, was testimony from bystanders who heard his frantic calls for help but didn’t respond because, they said, he didn’t sound “convincing,” and from homicide detectives who claimed that when they informed Blake of his wife’s death he put his head in his hands and wailed for thirty seconds, but no tears came out. Though Blake was acquitted by a jury that the Los Angeles District Attorney called “incredibly stupid,” the actor was found liable at a subsequent civil trial for $30 million in damages. A juror said Blake “should have been more mellow” on the witness stand, and according to Duke Law School professor Erwin Chemerinsky, “Everything came down to the question: Is Robert Blake believable? Here the jury didn’t believe him.” Thus Blake lost the case as much for being a “bad actor” as for being a bad actor.
A seventeen-year-old Amish boy was electrocuted by a downed power line that tangled in the wheels of his horse-drawn buggy.
A United Parcel Service driver on his way to deliver parts to Cheshire Medical Center in Keene, New Hampshire, was involved in a serious accident. He was taken to Cheshire Medical Center by ambulance with a head injury, but the hospital could not perform necessary tests because one of its machines was down, and the parts to fix it were in the driver’s wrecked van.
It’s ironic that Joseph Pulitzer, owner of a newspaper known for sensationalistic reporting during his lifetime, has provided the eponym behind the most respected journalism award in the U.S. But there are other examples of whitewashing with the passage of time and the institution of awards. Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, is now better known for his Nobel Peace Prize. Who’s to say one day we’ll not have an annual Gates Prize for the company most admired for its fair business practices?
—Anu Garg, A.Word.A.Day, posted on July 5, 2002, at wordsmith.org/awad
The publisher of The Salt Lake Tribune fired the company executive in charge of cost-cutting in what was described as a “cost-cutting” move.
Brad Pitt tore his Achilles tendon while playing Achilles in Troy (2004).
Sonny and Cher sang “I Got You Babe” on the David Letterman show at a time when they not only didn’t have each other, they didn’t even like each other.
Vincent Gardenia played the Bunkers’ next-door neighbor on All in the Family twice: First as “Mr. Bowman,” who sold his house to the Jeffersons, and again as “Frank Lorenzo,” who bought the same house from the Jeffersons.
A 2001 Father’s Day tribute on ESPN featured “How Sweet It Is (to be Loved by You)” sung by Marvin Gaye, who was shot and killed by his father in 1984.
Werner Klemperer (1920–2000), whose father, the conductor Otto Klemperer, had been forced to flee Germany in 1933 because he was half Jewish, won two Emmy Awards for his portrayal of Nazi Colonel Klink on the comedy series Hogan’s Heroes.
In 1941, Deputy Führer of Germany Rudolf Hess, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest advisors, flew solo to Scotland in hopes of negotiating peace terms with Great Britain. A letter Hess left for Hitler read in part: “If by chance, My Führer, this project, which I admit has but a very small chance of success, ends in failure and the fates decide against me, it will always be possible for you to deny all responsibility. Simply say I am crazy.” Hess flew an ME-110 fighter obtained from his friend, aircraft designer Willy Messerschmitt, who did not know Hess’s destination. Hess bailed out over Lanarkshire and was immediately taken prisoner by the British, a massive propaganda coup for the Allies. Meanwhile, back in the fatherland, an enraged Hitler issued a statement claiming that Hess was mentally ill and had undertaken the mission purely on his own initiative, then called Messerschmitt to account for releasing the plane to Hess. Pleading for his life, Messerschmitt asked, “How was I to know that someone so high in the Reich could be crazy?”
So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.… Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction.… The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist.… [The ego’s greatest triumph] is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us.
—Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1993)
It is the male hormone testosterone that gives women their sex drive, not the female hormone estrogen.
One of the judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court who ruled against gay marriage in 2003 is a lesbian.
Credit card companies refer to cardholders who pay off their outstanding balances every month, thereby avoiding finance charges, as “deadbeats.”
Howard Hughes (1905–1976) had to die to prove he was alive: The “bashful billionaire” was so reclusive that for several years there was intense public speculation over whether he was dead or alive, and only after his body arrived in Houston, Texas, for an autopsy was it confirmed that he had actually been alive. Bonus irony: After lengthy probate proceedings involving various putative wills, most of the billionaire’s fortune went to the Hughes Medical Institute, a charity Hughes had set up purely as a tax dodge.
This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
—Arthur C. Clarke (attributed)
The mid-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement was a reaction to the extravagant ornamentation and mass production of the Industrial Revolution. Its founder, the English designer William Morris (1834–1896), wanted to return to simplicity and craftsmanship and create sturdy, comfortable, inexpensive furniture for common people. The famous Morris chair is the embodiment of that aesthetic. But the chair, fashioned in small shops with simple tools, was so painstakingly crafted, only the wealthy could afford it.
Morris chair
(Voorhees Craftsman, www.voorheescraftsman.com)
Bonus irony: Eventually the Arts and Crafts movement did create inexpensive, serviceable furniture for the great middle class, but only by means of the mass production Morris so abhorred.
Neural network or neural computing: computer architecture modeled upon the human brain’s interconnected system of neurons, discerning and extracting the relationships that underlie the data with which it is presented. Most neural networks are software simulations run on conventional computers.… The network learns when examples (with known results) are presented to it; the weighting factors are adjusted—either through human intervention or by a programmed algorithm—to bring the final output closer to the known result.
Neural networks are good at providing very fast, very close approximations of the correct answer.… Among the tasks for which they are well suited are handwriting recognition, foreign language translation, process control, financial forecasting, medical data interpretation, artificial intelligence research, and parallel processing implementations of conventional processing tasks. In an ironic reversal, neural networks are being used to model disorders of the brain in an effort to discover better therapeutic strategies.
—Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition (2001–2005)
Entries for the Florida Press Club’s 2005 Excellence in Journalism Award for hurricane coverage were lost in Hurricane Katrina.
In 2006, the Outdoor Life Network signed a deal to carry Arena Football League games.
High winds prevented workers from installing a wind data collection tower in Oneida, Illinois.
The rise of polio in the twentieth century resulted from improved sanitation. Discovery of the “germ theory of disease” in the nineteenth century led to higher standards of cleanliness, especially in technologically advanced Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. In less sanitary times, babies and very young children developed antibodies to poliomyelitis, a viral disease that causes paralysis, spinal damage, and even death. But a cleaner environment left increasing numbers of children with no natural immunity, so it was the industrialized countries—not those of the poorer, less developed “third world,” that suffered the worst outbreaks of the disease.
A study by the National Science Foundation found that air purifiers using a process called “ionization” can generate ozone levels in a room that exceed the worst smog days in Los Angeles.
Americans are dumber than anyone realizes. Mike Judge’s new movie, Idiocracy, about a future America where everyone is really stupid, has been dumped by Fox because test audiences didn’t get the joke. Because they were too stupid to understand a movie about stupid people! Just when you think you’ve hit the bottom of the stupid barrel, you find out there’s another barrel right underneath it.
—Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, September 15, 2006
A toothless man was arrested for stealing toothbrushes in Brazil. “I know it’s a stupid thing to do,” said the thief. “I have no teeth—what was I thinking?”
Are You Ironic?
Anthropologists have long tried to identify the one quality that distinguishes humans from other animals. Some believed it to be language, until Koko the lowland gorilla learned to sign in complete sentences. Some thought it was the ability to make and use tools, until a chimpanzee was observed using a straw to capture termites. Some have lately suggested that humans are the only species with self-consciousness. We may never know the answer, and this is just speculation, but what if it were our sense of irony that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom? (At least some of us.) To be sure, the use and appreciation of irony can be important survival skills, and in order to develop those skills, it is useful to establish a baseline. Hence this test to measure innate irony. To compute your Irony Quotient, answer the questions, tally the numbers in parentheses, and refer to the chart at the end.
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1. The following best describes my view of irony:
A. Irony is a crutch. (0)
B. Irony is okay, if you don’t inhale. (2)
C. Irony is the hygiene of the mind. (4)
2. How ironic am I?
A. “Irony” is my middle name. (0)
B. I’m somewhat ironic. (2)
C. I’m not very ironic at all. Really. (4)
3. My most favorite expression is:
A. Golly! (0)
B. I could care less. (2)
C. As it were. (4)
4. The following comes closest to my motto:
A. Onward and upward! (0)
B. Never say never. (2)
C. Less is more. (4)
5. My response to irony in others is:
A. Ironic people suck. (0)
B. Ironic people are better than telemarketers. (2)
C. Ironic people are the last hope for the human race. (4)
6. When someone points out the “irony” of Lou Gehrig’s dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease, I:
A. Nod in agreement. (0)
B. Cringe at the misapprehension of irony. (2)
C. Reach for a baseball bat. (4)
7. My most favorite talk show host is:
A. Donny Deutsch (0)
B. Tavis Smiley (2)
C. David Letterman (4)
8. When I use the term “big ole” to describe something large I’m being:
A. Descriptive (0)
B. Just a little bit country (2)
C. Ironic (4)
9. My most favorite political commentator is:
A. Bill O’Reilly (0)
B. Bill Kristol (2)
C. Bill Maher (4)
10. “Air quotes” are:
A. Nifty (0)
B. Okay if used sparingly (2)
C. Pathological (4)
11. My most favorite comedian is:
A. Carrot Top (0)
B. Ray Romano (2)
C. Stephen Colbert (4)
12. When I hear the words “family values,” I think of:
A. Mom and Dad (0)
B. The Sopranos (2)
C. The Simpsons (4)
13. My most favorite social critic is:
A. Snoop Dogg (0)
B. Andy Rooney (2)
C. Douglas Coupland (4)
14. When I hear “o-rama” I think:
A. Sale! (0)
B. How dreary the free market can be. (2)
C. “Palooza!” (4)
15. My most favorite leading man is:
A. Adam Sandler (0)
B. Tom Hanks (2)
C. John Malkovich (4)
16. When Brooke Shields and Katie Holmes, then fiancée of Tom Cruise, both delivered baby girls on the same day in the same Los Angeles hospital, Shields told TV’s Access Hollywood, “You know, the irony is perfect.” During a Today show interview the previous summer, Cruise had faulted Shields’s use of antidepressants for postpartum depression after the birth of her first daughter, insisting that postpartum depression should be treated with exercise and vitamins rather than drugs. The incident is an example of:
A. Irony (0)
B. Coincidence (2)
C. Publicity (4)
17. My dream destination is:
A. Utah (0)
B. Amsterdam (2)
C. Key West (4)
18. My most favorite female pop singer is:
A. Alanis Morissette (0)
B. Sade (2)
C. Norah Jones (4)
19. A Weimaraner in a dress is:
A. Art (0)
B. Commerce (2)
C. Pseudo irony (4)
20. When Senator John McCain raised soft money to finance his campaign against soft money, it was:
A. Ironic (0)
B. Politics as usual (2)
C. Flamboyantly hypocritical (4)
21. My most favorite magazine is:
A. Entertainment Weekly (0)
B. Wired (2)
C. Mad (4)
22. My most favorite bl
og is:
A. Clusty (0)
B. The Smoking Gun (2)
C. Boingboing (4)
23. Which of the following statements about television is closest to the truth?
A. Television is good. (0)
B. Television is the opiate of the masses. (2)
C. Watching television ironically is better than watching unironically, but not as good as not watching at all. (4)
24. My most favorite TV interviewer is:
A. Larry King (0)
B. Charlie Rose (2)
C. Stephen Colbert (4)
25. When someone sarcastically tells me to “Have a nice day,” I reply:
A. “Thank you.” (0)
B. “Don’t tell me what kind of day to have.” (2)
C. “Same to you.” (4)
26. The difference between irony and sarcasm is:
A. Irony is a crude form of sarcasm. (0)
B. Sarcasm is a crude form of irony. (2)
C. I’d tell you if I thought you’d understand. (4)
RESULTS:
1–10 : Check for a pulse
11–20 : Terminally literal-minded
21–40 : Irony deficient
41–60 : Some hope, but don’t hold your breath
61–80 : Borderline wry
81–90 : Irony monger
91–100 : Congratulations, you Master of Irony, you
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INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point (Lipsky)
Achilles
Adler, Renata
adolescence
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain)
air purifiers
air quotes
Alan Gardiner Accordion Band
“Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking” (Hyde)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Ali G. See Cohen, Sacha Baron