Use

Comic irony
Irony is often used in literature to produce a comic effect. This may also be combined with satire. For instance, an
author may facetiously state something as a well-known fact and then demonstrate through the narrative that the
fact is untrue.
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice begins with the proposition "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single
man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." In fact, it soon becomes clear that Austen means
the opposite: women (or their mothers) are always in search of, and desperately on the lookout for, a rich single
man to make a husband. The irony deepens as the story promotes this romance and ends in a double marriage
proposal. "Austen's comic irony emerges out of the disjunction between Elizabeth's overconfidence (or pride) in her
perceptions of Darcy and the narrator's indications that her views are in fact partial and prejudicial." [44]
"The Third Man is a film that features any number of eccentricities, each of which contributes to the film's
perspective of comic irony as well as its overall cinematic self-consciousness." [45]
Writing about performances of Shakespeare's Othello in apartheid South Africa, Robert Gordon suggests: "Could it
be that black people in the audience ... may have viewed as a comic irony his audacity and navety in thinking he
could pass for white."[46]

Romantic irony and metafiction

Romantic irony is "an attitude of detached scepticism adopted by an author towards his or her work, typically
manifesting in literary self-consciousness and self-reflection". This conception of irony originated with the German
Romantic writer and critic Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel.[47]
Joseph Dane writes "From a twentieth-century perspective, the most crucial area in the history of irony is that
described by the term romantic irony." He discusses the difficulty of defining romantic irony: "But what is romantic
irony? A universal type of irony? The irony used by romantics? or an irony envisioned by the romantics and
romanticists?" He also describes the arguments for and against its use. [48]
Referring to earlier self-conscious works such as Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, Douglas Muecke points
particularly to Peter Weiss's 1964 play, "Marat/Sade". This work is a play within a play set in a lunatic asylum, in
which it is difficult to tell whether the players are speaking only to other players or also directly to the audience.
When The Herald says, "The regrettable incident you've just seen was unavoidable indeed foreseen by our
playwright", there is confusion as to who is being addressed, the "audience" on the stage or the audience in the
theatre. Also, since the play within the play is performed by the inmates of a lunatic asylum, the theatre audience
cannot tell whether the paranoia displayed before them is that of the players, or the people they are portraying.
Muecke notes that, "in America, Romantic irony has had a bad press", while "in England ... [it] is almost
unknown."[49]
However, in a book entitled English Romantic Irony, Anne Mellor, referring to Byron, Keats, Carlyle, Coleridge and
Lewis Carroll, writes, "Romantic irony is both a philosophical conception of the universe and an artistic program.
Ontologically, it sees the world as fundamentally chaotic. No order, no far goal of time, ordained by God or right
reason, determines the progression of human or natural events." Furthermore,
Of course, romantic irony itself has more than one mode. The style of romantic irony varies from writer to writer. ...
But however distinctive the voice, a writer is a romantic ironist if and when his or her work commits itself
enthusiastically both in content and form to a hovering or unresolved debate between a world of merely man-made
being and a world of ontological becoming.[50]

Similarly, metafiction is "Fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a
work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions (esp. naturalism) and narrative techniques." [51] It is a
type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, thereby exposing the fictional illusion.
Gesa Giesing writes that "the most common form of metafiction is particularly frequent in Romantic literature. The
phenomenon is then referred to as Romantic Irony." Giesing notes that "There has obviously been an increased
interest in metafiction again after World War II."[52]
For examples, Patricia Waugh quotes from several works at the top of her chapter headed "What is metafiction?".
These include:
"The thing is this./ That of all the several ways of beginning a book ... I am confident my own way of doing it is
best" - Tristram Shandy
"Fuck all this lying look what I am trying to write about is writing" - Albert Angelo
"Since I've started this story, I've gotten boils ..." - The death of the novel and other stories byRonald Sukenick[53]
Additionally, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction refers to John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's
Woman:[54]
For the first twelve chapters ... the reader has been able to immerse him or herself in the story, enjoying the kind of
'suspension of disbelief ' required of realist novels ... what follows is a remarkable act of metafictional 'framebreaking'. Chapter 13 notoriously begins:
I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own
mind. ... if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense.

Socratic irony
Main article: Socratic method
This is "The dissimulation of ignorance practised by Socrates as a means of confuting an adversary". [55] Socrates
would pretend to be ignorant of the topic under discussion, to draw out the inherent nonsense in the arguments of
his interlocutors. The Chambers Dictionary defines it as "a means by which a questioner pretends to know less
than a respondent, when actually he knows more".
Zoe Williams of The Guardian wrote: "The technique [of Socratic irony], demonstrated in the Platonic dialogues,
was to pretend ignorance and, more sneakily, to feign credence in your opponent's power of thought, in order to tie
him in knots."[56]
A more modern example of Socratic irony can be seen on the American crime fiction television film
series, Columbo. The character Lt. Columbo is seemingly nave and incompetent. His untidy appearance adds to
this fumbling illusion. As a result, he is underestimated by the suspects in murder cases he is investigating. With
their guard down and their false sense of confidence, Lt. Columbo is able to solve the cases leaving the murderers
feeling duped and outwitted.[57]

Irony as infinite, absolute negativity

Danish philosopher Sren Kierkegaard, and others, see irony, such as that used by Socrates, as a disruptive force
with the power to undo texts and readers alike.[58] The phrase itself is taken fromHegel's Lectures on Aesthetics,
and is applied by Kierkegaard to the irony of Socrates. This tradition includes 19th-century German critic and
novelist Friedrich Schlegel ("On Incomprehensibility"),Charles Baudelaire, Stendhal, and the 20th

century deconstructionist Paul de Man ("The Concept of Irony"). In Kierkegaard's words, from On the Concept of
Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates:
[Socratic] irony [is] the infinite absolute negativity. It is negativity, because it only negates; it is infinite, because it
does not negate this or that phenomenon; it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher
something that still is not. The irony established nothing, because that which is to be established lies behind it... [59]
Where much of philosophy attempts to reconcile opposites into a larger positive project, Kierkegaard and others
insist that ironywhether expressed in complex games of authorship or simple litotesmust, in Kierkegaard's
words, "swallow its own stomach". Irony entails endless reflection and violent reversals, and ensures
incomprehensibility at the moment it compels speech. Similarly, among other literary critics, writer David Foster
Wallace viewed the pervasiveness of ironic and other postmodern tropes as the cause of "great despair and stasis
in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists [ironies] pose terrifically vexing problems." [60]

Irony and awkwardness

The '90s saw an expansion of the definition of irony from "saying what one doesn't mean" into a "general stance
of detachment from life in general"[61] This detachment served as a shield against the awkwardness of everyday life.
Humor from that era (most notably Seinfeld) relies on the audience watching the show with some detachment from
the show's typical signature awkward situations.
The generation of people in the United States who grew up in the 90s (Millennials) are seen as having this same
sort of detachment from serious or awkward situations in life as well. Hipsters are thought of as using irony as a
shield against those same serious or genuine confrontations.[62]

Misuse
The words irony and ironic are often misused.
Dan Shaughnessy wrote:
We were always kidding about the use of irony. I maintained that it was best never to use the word because it was
too often substituted for coincidence. (Alanis Morissette's song "Isn't it Ironic?" cites multiple examples of things
that are patently not ironic)[63]
Tim Conley cites the following: "Philip Howard assembled a list of seven implied meanings for the word "ironically",
as it opens a sentence:

By a tragic coincidence

By an exceptional coincidence

By a coincidence of no importance

You and I know, of course, though other less intelligent mortals walk benighted under the midday sun

Oddly enough, or it's a rum thing that

Oh hell! I've run out of words to start a sentence with."[64]

Punctuation
Main article: Irony punctuation

No agreed method for indicating irony exists, though many ideas have been suggested. For instance, an irony
punctuation mark was proposed in the 1580s, when Henry Denham introduced a rhetorical question mark
or percontation point which resembles a reversed question mark. This mark was also advocated by the French
poet Marcel Bernhardt at the end of the 19th century to indicate irony or sarcasm. French writer Herv
Bazin suggested another pointe d'ironie: the Greek letter psi with a dot below it, while Tom Driberg recommended
that ironic statements should be printed in italics that lean the other way to conventional italics. [65]

See also

Accismus

Apophasis

Auto-antonym

Contradiction

Double standard

Hypocrisy

Ironism

Irony punctuation

Oxymoron

Paradox

Post-irony

Sarcasm

Satire

Notes
1.

Jump up^ Liddell & Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, v. sub .

2.

Jump up^ Muecke, DC., The Compass of Irony, Routledge, 1969. p. 80

3.

4.
5.

^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Preminger, A. & Brogan, T. V. F. Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics, MJF Books, 1993, ISBN 9780691032719, pp. 633635.
^ Jump up to:a b Fowler, H. W., A dictionary of modern English usage, 1926.
Jump up^ Gassner, J., Quinn, E., The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama, Courier Dover Publications,
2002, p. 358.

6.

Jump up^ ""irony" at dictionary.com". Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 2010-12-23.

7.

Jump up^ Quoted in The Free Dictionary under ironic: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ironic.

8.

Jump up^ Oxford English Dictionary, second entry for irony

9.

Jump up^ Encyclopdia Britannica[1]

10.

Jump up^ Whately, R. Rhet. in Encycl. Metrop. (1845) I. 265/1 (cited in the OED entry)

11.

Jump up^ Oxford English Dictionary

12.

Jump up^ Abrams, M. H., & Harpham, G. G., A glossary of literary terms, 9th Ed., Wadsworth Cengage
Learning, 2009.

13.

Jump up^ Horberry, R., Sounds Good on Paper: How to Bring Business Language to Life, A&C Black,
2010. p. 135. [2]

14.

Jump up^ Martin, R. A., The psychology of humor: an integrative approach, Elsevier Academic Press, 2007.
p. 13.

15.
16.

^ Jump up to:a b Oxford English Dictionary entry for irony

Jump up^ Stanton, R., Dramatic Irony in Hawthorne's Romances, Modern Language Notes, Vol. 71, No. 6
(Jun., 1956), pp. 420426, The Johns Hopkins University Press.

17.

Jump up^ Clausius, C., The gentleman is a tramp: Charlie Chaplin's comedy, P. Lang, 1989, p. 104.

18.

Jump up^ Gulino, P., Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, Continuum, 2004, pp. 910.

19.

Jump up^ Storey, I. C. and Allan, A., A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama, John Wiley & Sons, 2008, p. 125. [3]

20.

Jump up^ Booth, W. C., A Rhetoric of Irony, University of Chicago Press, 1974, p. 63. [4]

21.

Jump up^ Poe, E. A., The Cask of Amontillado, The Creative Company, 2008, pp. 2223. [5]

22.

Jump up^ Adams, A., Parallel Lives of Jesus: A Guide to the Four Gospels, Presbyterian Publishing Corp,
2011, p. 30. [6]

23.

Jump up^ William, J., Cliffs Complete Romeo and Juliet, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009, pp. 135, 169,
181. [7]

24.
25.

Jump up^ Colebrook, Claire. Irony. London and New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 14.
Jump up^ Ellestrm, L., Divine Madness: On Interpreting Literature, Music and the Visual Arts, Bucknell
University Press, 2002, p. 51.

26.

Jump up^ The Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr. by Doug Linder. 2001 Retrieved 9 September 2008.

27.

^ Jump up to:a b Horberry, R., Sounds Good on Paper: How to Bring Business Language to Life, A&C Black,
2010. p. 138. [8]

28.

Jump up^ Lenguazco, CD., English through movies. The wizard of Oz, Librera-Editorial Dykinson, 2005, p.
27.[9]

29.

Jump up^ Gibbs, W. G., & Colston, H. L., Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader,
Routledge, 2007, p. 59. [10]

30.

Jump up^ Shanta Rameshwar Rao, The Krishna, Orient Blackswan, 2005, p. 69

31.

Jump up^ Hesiod, Theogony Works and Days Testimonia, Harvard University Press, 2006, p. xxxii.

32.

Jump up^ Dixit, S., Hardy's Tess Of The D'urbervilles, Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 2001, p. 182. [11]

33.

Jump up^ Hardy, T., Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Oxford World's Classics, p. 420.

34.

Jump up^ Wordplay

35.

Jump up^ Wells, H.G., The war that will end war, 1914.

36.

Jump up^ Neale, Jonathan The American War, p. 17, ISBN 1-898876-67-3.

37.

Jump up^ Bacevich, A., in Niebuhr, R., The Irony of American History, University of Chicago Press, 2010, p.
xiv.

38.

Jump up^ Jack Kelly Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that
Changed the World, Perseus Books Group: 2005, ISBN 0465037224, 9780465037223: pp. 25

39.

Jump up^ Fehrenbacher, D. E., Slavery, Law, and Politics : The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective,
Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 90. [12]

40.

Jump up^ Kean, S., The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of
the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, Random House, 2011, pp. 226228. [13]

41.

Jump up^ Last words of presidents

42.

Jump up^ Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2007, Page B1: It Dawned on Adults After WWII: 'You'll Shoot
Your Eye Out!'. Retrieved October 29, 2009.

43.

Jump up^ Hanson, D. & Marty, E., Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival, University
of California Press, 2012, p. 1. [14]

44.

Jump up^ Ferriss, S. & Young, M., Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction, Routledge, 2006, p. 77. [15]

45.

Jump up^ Jones, W. E. & Vice, S., Ethics at the Cinema, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 295.[16]

46.

Jump up^ Gordon, R., in The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Special Section, South African
Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century, Volume 9, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009. p. 147.[17]

47.

Jump up^ OED, entry under Romantic irony.

48.

Jump up^ Dane, J. A., The Critical Mythology of Irony, University of Georgia Press, 2011, Ch. 5 [18]

49.

Jump up^ Muecke, DC., The Compass of Irony, Routledge, 1969. pp. 178180

50.

Jump up^ Mellor, A. K., English romantic irony, Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 4, 187. [19]

51.

Jump up^ OED, entry for metafiction.

52.

Jump up^ Giesing, G., Metafictional Aspects in Novels by Muriel Spark, GRIN Verlag, 2004, p. 6.[20]

53.

Jump up^ Waugh, P., Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Routledge, 2002, p.
1.[21]

54.

Jump up^ Nicol, B., The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 2009,
pp. 108109. [22]

55.

Jump up^ Oxford English Dictionary under irony.

56.

Jump up^ "Online: The Final Irony". London: Guardian. 28 June 2003. Retrieved 2010-12-23.

57.

Jump up^ Cox, G. How to Be a Philosopher: Or How to Be Almost Certain That Almost Nothing Is
Certain,Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010, p. 23.

58.

Jump up^ Kierkegaard, S, The concept of irony with continuous reference to Socrates (1841), Harper &
Row, 1966, p. 278.

59.
60.

Jump up^ Quoted in

Jump up^ Wallace, David Foster. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction". Review of Contemporary
Fiction 13 (2): 151194.

61.

Jump up^ Kotsko, Adam, Awkwardness., O-Books, 2010, pp. 21

62.

Jump up^ How to Live Without Irony

63.

Jump up^ Shaughnessy, D., Senior Year: A Father, A Son, and High School Baseball, Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2008, pp. 91-92. [23]

64.

Jump up^ Conley, T., Joyces Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation, University of
Toronto Press, 2011, p. 81. [24]

65.

Jump up^ Houston, K., Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other
Typographical Marks, W. W. Norton & Company, 2013, pp. 211-244.

Bibliography

Bogel, Fredric V. "Irony, Inference, and Critical Understanding." Yale Review, 50319.

Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Bryant, G. A., & Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Recognizing verbal irony in spontaneous speech.Metaphor and Symbol, 17,
99115.

Colebrook, Claire. Irony. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Gibbs, R. W. (2000). Irony in talk among friends.Metaphor and Symbol, 15, 527.

Hutcheon, Linda. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1994.

Kierkegaard, Sren. On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates. 1841; Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992.

Lavandier, Yves. Writing Drama, pages 263315.

Lee, C. J., & Katz, A. N. (1998). The differential role of ridicule in sarcasm and irony. Metaphor and Symbol, 13, 115.

Leggitt, J., & Gibbs, R. W. (2000). Emotional reactions to verbal irony. Discourse Processes, 29(1), 124.

Muecke, D. C. The Compass of Irony. London: Methuen, 1969.

Star, William T. "Irony and Satire: A Bibliography." Irony and Satire in French Literature. Ed. University of South Carolina
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina College of Humanities and
Social Sciences, 1987. 183209.

External links

Look up irony in
Wiktionary, the free
dictionary.

"The final irony"a Guardian article about irony, use and misuse of the term

Article on the etymology of Irony

"Irony", by Norman D. Knox, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973)

"Sardonicus"a web-resource that provides access to similes, ironic and otherwise, harvested from the
web.

Excerpt on dramatic irony from Yves Lavandier's Writing Drama Writing Drama has a 52-page chapter on
dramatic irony (with insights on the three phases (installation-exploitation-resolution), surprise, mystery,
suspense, diffuse dramatic irony, etc.)

"American Irony" compared with British irony, quoting Stephen Fry

American and British irony compared by Simon Pegg

Modern example of ironic writing