irony and self-abjurement

the oxford english dictionary defines irony as "a figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used." irony's more specific dramatic meaning includes the "ill-timed or perverse arrival of an event that is in itself desirable . . . a [l]iterary technique in which the audience perceives meanings unknown to the characters."

yet the greek etymological roots of irony point to a worse kind of disingenuity. εἰρωνεία eirōneía which, when translated, roughly equates irony with hypocrisy and pretended ignorance while hinting at an underlying meanspiritedness.

now, i am ironic. not my existence (though that's debatable, i suppose), but irony makes a regular appearance in my general conversation. this often leads to problems. one time, i accidentally convinced a friend of mine that i did, in fact, believe everything pat robertson says. but i never thought about the fact that i simply lived with and among a very irony-receptive audience until i met a girl who did not understand what irony was because she had grown up in spain, where irony apparently does not exist.

as far as i was concerned, this was a vast oversight on the part of the spanish. how could i possibly flee to spain after defaulting on all my college loans now? it's one thing to learn a language and another to learn how to be honest and straightforward all the time and i was, quite frankly, ill-equipped to deal with consistent honesty. fearful, i proceeded to teach quenna how to speak and respond to irony - at her request.

the process began with baby steps - my first directive was to pause whenever anyone said something that sounded . . . untruthful. ridiculous. potentially insulting. if a qualification or a half-hearted, self-satisfied comment did not emerge within 30 seconds or so, the person was either being truthful and was simply weird or they were, in fact, being an unmitigated jerk. potentially, both.

quenna then moved to practicing saying untruths with a straight face. she would wander into my room to tell me that pants were originally meant to be worn on the head as a kind of wrap but migrated south to fend off frostbite. or that the christian right was beginning to make sense to her.

eventually, she graduated to saying the opposite of what she meant, completely deadpan, straight-faced, serious. and then she moved back to spain, where no one would understand this kind of behavior.

so if not the spaniards, who uses irony? i think upper and upper middle-class, college-educated, liberal people are ironic. in that they are ironic and they employ irony to make points, mostly to themselves. fundamentally, i think irony might be a form of verbal and emotional bullying. you're an idiot if you don't get it.

am i a bully? i don't think i come across that way. but i might think you're an idiot if you don't get it.

the brits argue that americans don't understand irony. in that we are far less likely to think that deadpan humor and uncomfortable situations are less funny and more . . . straight-up uncomfortable. this is a fair assessment, i think, if properly qualified. british advertisements employ irony, after all. we've only just begun to steal that particular approach, and our versions of funny-by-not-being-funny ads tend towards existential ennui.

i find that intended american irony falls flat:


whereas unintended irony is mindblowingly hilarious:


though the producers clearly understood the ironic facets of this commercial, the lack of understanding prompted an equally hilarious response:


are americans just naturally funny, in an ironic way? is it because a large number of americans don't really understand what in the world irony is? is laughing at this kind of behavior a way of taking ourselves less seriously, or a method of differentiating ourselves from those who are acting in ways that we perceive as uneducated or heavy-handed or . . . wrong?

the discrepancies between intended and unintended irony would indicate that taking academic courses on irony as a literary device might not be the best way to develop the ironic sensibilities of americans. but just in case, you can now buy papers on irony online:

As the world is becoming more specific, the writing techniques are also becoming more specific. The writers have more variety of literary tools such as allusion, metaphor, symbolism, and irony. Irony is the most common and most efficient technique of the satirist. Since this technique is so popular and being used in many different ways, people do not really understand the true meaning of the word. A clear understanding of the word irony as it applies to literature can be attained by an analysis of its formal, historical, and informal definitions.

alanis morrisette should have read this before asking the world whether rain on your wedding day was ironic.

setting aside the god-awful nature of the language here (this is an a+?), there is a sentence arguing for irony as a "tool," a method of making one's point. and certainly, irony is a literary tool - thus the number of writers who defend it as a necessary and oftentimes immensely illuminating method of conveying information and meaning. david foster wallace is (was) a proponent of irony as a method of stripping away sentimentalism and, in a lot of ways, deconstructing complexity. as he writes, "the great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates."

this is an interesting observation, although i do not necessarily agree with his interpretation. after all, is irony not also a method of obscuring one's meaning? is it not a veil used to deflect criticism and interrogation, a method of self-abjurement? a way of not taking responsibility for one's opinions and conclusions? and can we trust a man who proclaimed irony to be king and then proceeded to kill himself?

apparently, there are then two versions of irony - using irony and viewing or interpreting events through the lens of irony. i suspect that i tend towards the latter, which is why i find most everything to be at least a little humorous. irony is my way of not taking myself or the world too seriously. as jessamyn west asserts, "a taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself." though her differentiation between humor and irony seems a bit like pedantic hair-splitting to me.

instead, perhaps jean stafford is correct in correct in noting that "irony is, i feel, a very high form of morality." although maybe she was being ironic.