In Defense of Irony

Okay, maybe not this one, but...

Okay, then. You tell me. If being afraid to fly your whole life and then getting into a plane crash once you decide to confront your fear, if that’s not irony–because it seems to me textbook-like freshman in high school irony–then what exactly is irony? Can you provide me with a like web-browser generated response on your iPhone–which, I might add, an anarchist with an iPhone itself seems, somehow, ironic.

No. No, no. Dictionary dot com is a half-step above asking your little brother. Go with Merriam-Webster. Those people have some, you know, credibility.

No. Merriam Webster. No other Websters. It’s like with the Jacksons or the Baldwins. One is stellar and all the rest are a little off.

No, I’m pretty sure all the dictionary Websters are related. I think their like grandfather was Daniel Webster, and there was a big blowout over the family dictionary fortune, and all the kids were like: fuck you, I’ll start my own goddamned dictionary. And but Merriam–the quietest, least assuming of them, I think–was the only one that knew shit about dictionaries.

The rest were all, you know, polo ponies and yachts and exploitative sex acts at Ivy League schools. Which, I’ll grant you, isn’t at all ironic. Because it’s not surprising. Which is what I’m pretty sure Merriam is going to say about irony. When what happens…

No. I do not know the definition per se. Which is why I am asking you to look it up on your phone.

Sorry. Your iPhone.

Okay. Huh. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. Socratic irony? I was not aware.

Dramatic irony? No. That’s not it either.

No, no. That one’s too simple. I don’t think that’s irony–sorry, Merriam–so much as it is sarcasm. Like telling your friend with cancer, who knows he looks like microwaved death, oh no, you look awesome, guy.

Saying guy is how he’d know it’s sarcasm, or irony, or whatever.

Can we at least agree, given that Merriam seems to be suggesting a kind of incongruity between what is and what would be expected to be in any reasonable scenario–that finding ten thousand spoons, which itself seems Dantian or Borgesian in it’s horribleness, when all you need is one knife, is ironic?

Okay, not at a spoon factory, say. But in normal life. You’d be like that dude with the lantern, looking for an honest man. Cain? Was it Cain?

And yes, fine. If you needed a knife that goddamned bad, you could grind down the edge of the spoon. You’re right.

They do that shit in prison all the time.

Tagged as: double irony, irony, No seriously the song was about Uncle Joey from Full House, ten thousand spoons--no knife, That's right--Uncle Joey getting head from a teenage gelfling in a theater, To be fair no one really knew who she was when the out of focus video for "You Oughta Know" came out and it was only later people figured out she was a gelfling who used to be on Nickelodeon, Uncle Joey, you know you thought that song was awesome the first thirty times you heard it