My high school English teacher introduced the concept of irony to me and my classmates with the song “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette. The song contains a variety of situations that are implied to be ironic; however, as my English teacher noted, all of the situations are actually coincidences1. Here’s an example of this mistaken irony in Morissette’s song:
Man of my dreams
It’s meeting the man of my dreams, and then meeting his beautiful wife.
While the statement is tragic, it’s not ironic. Irony is typically defined as a violation of one’s expectations2, and for meeting the man of your dreams, you might actually expect him to already be married given he’s truly that special. In other words, you would expect a desirable man to already be in a relationship. What this example highlights is our tendency to misattribute tragedies and coincidences as ironic.
To ground our understanding of irony, let’s think about the following example of irony:
Ironic fire station
A fire station burns down.
It’s ironic because fire stations are used to fight fires. If any building were to be at the lowest risk for burning down, it would be the fire station as it has the most resources and is the most prepared to fight fires. Hence, one expects a fire station not to burn down; therefore, a fire station burning down is ironic.
So now we have an interesting question:
Question
Why do people misattribute irony?
As we previously noted, many people think that the song “Ironic” depicts irony; yet, most instances are really coincidences or tragedies. To understand what’s going on in the song, let’s examine the following lyric:
Rainy wedding
It’s like rain on your wedding day.
On the surface, there’s no reason to expect a wedding day to be rain-free, but a quick google search reveals that most stock photo depictions of wedding days involve sunny, clear skies. So, if irony is a violation of one’s expectations, is an expectation for a wedding day to not be rainy a “reasonable” expectation? Is a “reasonable” expectation required for a situation to be counted as ironic? What sorts of expectations and their violations create irony?
For an analogous example, it’s certainly not ironic for a person to fail to pick winning numbers for a lottery, but most depictions of a lottery involve a winner. When I google search “lottery”, I see many images of smiling people holding large checks. Why is “rain on your wedding day” ironic but “choosing the wrong lottery numbers” not? What even makes “a fire station burning down” clearly ironic but “rain on your wedding day” a debate?
Notice that it’s the sole purpose of the fire station to fight fires, but it is not the purpose of the wedding day to be a sunny day: we merely associate wedding days with sunny days. Hence, we have two types of irony:
Teleological irony
A situation where the explicit purpose of an object or event is violated.
Associative irony
A situation where the associative relationship between two conditions fails to hold.
In the case of our fire station, the purpose of the fire station is to put out fires, so it’s ironic when it can’t put out its own fire. In the case of our rainy wedding, wedding days are associated with being sunny, so it’s associatively ironic when it rains.
With this theory in mind, how might we make a wedding day teleologically3 ironic? If the explicit purpose of a wedding is for two people to get married, then how about:
No marrige today
It’s like getting a divorce on your wedding day.
Or, if we really care about the weather, the teleological lyric might be:
Cold wedding
It’s like rain on your wedding day that you held in Antarctica to avoid the rain.
It hasn’t rained in some parts of Antarctica for millions of years, so if you really didn’t want it to rain on your wedding, Antarctica would be the best location. But let’s note, this isn’t a strong case of teleological irony since it isn’t the explicit purpose of Antarctica not to rain, you merely created this purpose.
While our theory describes and differentiates types of irony, it also tells us how to negate irony. For example, while it’s ironic for a fire station to burn down, the following scenario is rather fitting:
Lazy cops
A police station, known for its lazy officers, gets robbed.
It’s ironic for a police station to get robbed, but when all of its officers are incompetent at their job, you might expect that station to get robbed. Embedding this “anti-ironic” example into a story, we have:
Cosmic justice
One night walking home from work, a man jumps out of an alley and demands your wallet. You fearfully hand over your wallet and the man runs away. Moments later, after letting the shock leave your body, you call 911 thinking to yourself, “Surely the police will help stop this criminal and get my wallet back.” Two officers arrive an hour later, clearly eating donuts as they pull up in their cruiser. They ask you what happened and as you describe the crime, they take very few notes, grimacing whenever they write. After you finish, there’s a moment of silence between the officers. One officer briefly glances at you, shrugs and says, “Welp, I bet the thief is long gone by now. Hope you didn’t lose too much money.” You think to yourself, “WOW! These guys are no help. I would have been better off calling the mail man!” Sauntering home that night, you think of all the ways you would fix the crime in your city if only you were in charge. A week later, you pick up the newspaper and read the headline: “Local Police Station Robbed in Broad Daylight.” You smile and think to yourself, “Huh, how fitting.”
In our story, we journey through irony as we first expect the police officers to help, then we find them to be quite unhelpful, and finally, in some act of cosmic justice, the police are punished by the very thing they exist to fight.
The opposite of teleological irony is this “fittingness”/cosmic justice we described with our lazy police officers. I don’t think there’s an opposite of associative irony, but by adding more purposeful descriptions (like Antarctica), we’re able to transition situations from associativity to teleology. Theories are powerful not only as they are explanatory, but also as they are prescriptive. For one last fix, let’s revisit the “man of my dreams” example:
Ironic wife
It’s meeting the man of my dreams, and then meeting his ugly wife.
Acknowledgements
I can’t say that this theory of irony is entirely my own. My friends, Kenny and Will, and I formulated it together during one of Kenny’s famous late night hangouts.
Footnotes
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The lack of irony in Morissette’s song has been widely noted, and, funny enough, this lack of irony in a song called “Ironic” is itself ironic. One would expect a song called “Ironic” to include only correct depictions of irony. ↩
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Irony, at its core, is a kind of prediction error; it’s a mismatch between what we expected and what reality delivered. ↩
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I should probably define “teleology”, but that’s an entire note of its own. ↩