Download What is Irony?

What is Irony?
Irony
• A surprise!
• It is the difference between what we expect to happen,
and what actually does happen.
• It is often used to add suspense and interest.
• It is also used to keep the reader thinking about the
moral of the story.
3 Types of Irony
Irony
Verbal
Irony
Situational
Irony
Dramatic
Irony
Verbal Irony
• The simplest kind of irony.
• You use it everyday when you say one thing and really
mean another.
• It is often similar to a sarcastic response.
• Examples:
o When you appear to be sick and someone asks you if you’re okay. You say
“Of course!” But in the meantime you are vomiting and fainting.
o Mother: “I see you ironed your shirt.”
Boy: “But I just dug it out of the bottom of the hamper.”
Situational Irony
• The outcome of a situation is inconsistent with what we
would expect would logically or normally occur; when a
situation turns out to be the opposite of what we thought it
would be.
• Examples:
The teacher’s daughter is a high school drop out.
The mayor’s wife gets caught stealing.
The chef won’t eat his/her own cooking.
The barber always needs a hair cut himself.
If you have a phobia of long words, you must tell people that you are
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobic.
o A rat infestation at the Department of Sanitation
o A person Tweets about how Twitter is a waste of time and energy.
o You comment on the beautiful weather you’ve been having just five minutes
before a tornado rips through your house.
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Dramatic Irony
• Occurs when the audience knows something that the
characters in the story, on the screen, or on the stage do not
know. It’s like the audience is more aware of what’s going on
than the people in the production.
• This is used to engage the audience and keep them actively
involved in the storyline.
• Example:
o Romeo believes that Juliet is dead, but the audience knows that she
has only been given a potion to sleep.
o In all of the Friday the 13th movies, we know Jason is in the woods.
The characters do not. When they go out into the woods we are afraid
for them because we know that they are in danger. We scream for
them to run, we get excited when they fall, we cringe when we know
that Jason is right behind the tree.
Review
• Irony is a kind of a surprise. It is the difference between what is
expected to happen, and what actually does happen.
• Irony is like a glitch, a twist, or a last minute switch in the
game. It is an interruption of events that cause an unexpected
outcome.
There are three types of irony:
• Verbal
• Situational
• Dramatic
Life’s True Ironies
• The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill
in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the most
expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers
and applause from onlookers. A minute later they were both eaten by a
killer whale.
• A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a
carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After
weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her repeatedly with an axe,
leaving her mentally retarded.
• In 1992, Frank Perkins of Los Angeles made an attempt on the world
flagpole-sitting record. Suffering from the flu, he came down eight hours
short of the 400-day record, to find that his sponsor had gone bankrupt,
his girlfriend had left him and his phone and electricity had been cut off.
Life’s True Ironies
• A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking
frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist
towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the
deadly current, she whacked him with a handy plank of wood by
the back door, breaking his arm in two places. Till that moment he
had been happily listening to his Walkman.
• Two animal rights activists were protesting the cruelty of sending
pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs, all two
thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and
stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.
• Iraqi terrorist Khay Rahnajet didn't pay enough postage on a letter
bomb. It came back with "return to sender" stamped on it.
Forgetting it was the bomb, he opened it and was blown to bits.
Life’s True Ironies
• Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's 2005 state of the nation address,
in which he promised to remedy his country's chronic electricity
shortages, was blacked out by a power failure.
• A 17-year-old Amish boy was electrocuted by a downed power line that
became tangled in the wheels of his horse-drawn buggy.
• The "Marlboro Man" died of lung cancer.
• A 2001 Father's Day tribute on ESPN featured "How Sweet It Is (to be
Loved by You)," sung by Marvin Gaye, who was shot and killed by his
father in 1984.
• Entries for the Florida Press Club's 2005 Excellence in Journalism Award
for hurricane coverage were lost in Hurricane Katrina.
Ironic endings -
Read each of the story summaries
below and then brainstorm what an ironic ending to the story would be.
1. The captain of the football team and the captain of the cheerleading
squad have been dating since middle school, and are among the most
popular students at their high school. It is now their senior year and
everyone assumes that they will be named king and queen of the
homecoming dance. What happens at the homecoming dance?
2. There is a thief at school! Someone has been breaking into student
lockers and stealing cell phones, laptops, and other electronics. The
school’s principal has made many announcements that students should
be responsible with their belongings, as well as brought in several
suspected student troublemakers for questioning. But weeks go by
before the thief is caught. When the thief is caught, who is it?