Isn't It Moronic?

Alanis Morissette is rather infamous for having a song titled Ironic that is considered hardly ironic at all. The song details mostly bad luck, such as getting a free ride after you've paid, and so forth. It was so bashed at the time that it made people think about irony.

I remember telling someone in a newsgroup that I thought it was ironic that he advocated people being honest about who they were (in a newsgroup, you can hide behind pseudonyms) while he himself hid behind a pseudonym. I'll say that it isn't quite irony, more than it is hypocrisy.

What is irony? Literature is where irony is explored the most often. There's verbal irony where you say one thing, but mean another. In that case, sarcasm and hypocrisy may be forms of verbal irony ("this is a wonderful day", on a rainy day).

There's dramatic irony, where one person says something, but the audience knows it's not true. (Mozart says to Salieri that Salieri is a good man, the only man who he can really trust, when Salieri is the man who is trying to destroy him).

There's situational irony, where expectations of what should happen don't. This is perhaps the irony that most people think of as irony, though usually it's used more strongly than the definition suggests.

There's cosmic irony, which is the kind of irony that Morissette comes closest to dealing with, which is that nature, fate, or God works against what you want. Thus, winning the lottery, and being killed a few days later is considered cosmic irony. There's a famous Twilight Zone episode where this guy decides to build a bomb shelter for the armageddon, and places all his favorite books in there to read for the rest of his life. When said event occurs, he heads into the shelter, only to break his glasses, and be unable to read the books. This is cosmic irony.

Irony is typically built from expectations. For example, there were programs developed to help teenage mothers raise their children. It was thought that with education and money that the situation would remedy itself. However, some argue that these programs have made teenage pregnancy worse, by making it viable for teenagers to have children. Thus, the expectation was that a program that would help reduce teenage pregnancy has instead increased it could be considered dramatically ironic.

The people who abuse the term irony the most are, in my mind, sportscasters. Sportscasters already have it bad. Many are wannabe athletes, or former athletes, who are effectively doing news, but lack the kind of credibility real news folks have. The only thing worse that sportscasters in terms of credibility are entertainment news reporters, who are cloyingly irritating beyond belief.

Indeed, sports reporters, most of whom are not reporters, but really pundits, who spout out opinions on the latest sports "news", have actually done a great deal to elevate their stature. They often talk like their news brethren, part of which is to elevate their use of vocabulary.

So while I hardly expect a sports announcer to use terms like solipsistic or penultimate (which means "next to last"---yes, there's a word for that), words like irony are used all the time.

In the case of sports, irony is almost always used in place of "coincidence", although I can see it as a form of cosmic irony, though not nearly as strong. For example, if the Miami Heat were to meet the Lakers, thus Shaq meeting his old team, this meeting is often referred to as ironic. Or if a player moved to a different team, and he was coached by a coach he used to have on his previous team (say, Parcells with Bledsoe) that might be ironic.

Usually, in these discussions of irony, there is some element of chance. For example, Parcells deliberately picking Bledsoe for his team is not really irony. However, Parcells kicking off some player and that player managing to beat Parcells team is often considered irony, because Parcells lacked faith in the player, and the player did well anyway. That is oddly enough, a kind of irony, at least in my book.

The point is that irony is so hard to pin down correctly, that maybe we should jettison the word from our vocabulary. Sports announcers love to use it because of that reason. They don't use it correctly, but heck, fans don't get it either, and it makes the announcers look smart.

I once heard a Brazilian fellow talking about events surrounding 9-11. In particular, right around that time, his advisor had flown in to deal with his thesis proposal. However, he was unable to leave because all flights had been shut down. Furthermore, many people had taken rental cars, so they, too, were mostly unavailable.

It suddenly hit his advisor that he could rent a moving van, as many people would not have thought of that as a means of transportation. At the time, the man sported a large moustache, and looked a bit dark skinned. Indeed, he might have been mistaken for someone of Middle Eastern heritage. At such a heightened time of paranoia, a man wanting to rent a van that looked like him might be considered rather suspicious.

The Brazilian fellow remarked "and the supreme irony of it all is that he's Jewish!". Ha ha!

But was it irony? It feels like it. Here's a man that is being assumed a possible terrorist because he looks like he's from the Middle East, but in truth, he's Jewish! (Presumably, a friend of the U.S.).

So apparently, there was a recent report that several of the DVDs for Munich were encoded improperly, and the result was that the viewers who were going to screen it were unable to watch it. One person remarked it was ironic that this encoding, which was meant to prevent people from copying, ended up causing people to be unable to watch it (due to a botch-up).

It would have been ironic, however, to have the opposite occur. The intention was to prevent these DVDs from being copied. It would have been ironic if all these methods to protect copying ended up, somehow, facilitating more copying. That's how you'd imagine it being ironic.

Even so, if you imagine the intention is to make sure that only the people who are authorized to watch it can watch it, then that, I'd say, is ironic, because all the protections placed to make sure the right person is the only person who'd watch it failed and the person couldn't watch it after all.

Except, of course, that wasn't the goal. The goal was to prevent screeners from copying, and it's just amusing to realize that being unable to watch it is also a way of preventing people from copying it.

So, dear sportscasters, and everyone else, shall we simply agree not to use irony, because ironically enough, most of us don't know how to use the term irony. Now, isn't that ironic?

(By the way, Alanis has been quoted that her song is indeed ironic because it lacks irony. Is that an example of irony? I think not. And it goes to show you that we don't know what it means).