Irony. That which is intended to be understood but not stated, the double meaning, the driving force of popular culture since 1992. Ah, the sweet nihilism and detached, angsty existence than was grunge (thanks Kurt). Ok, so it’s a little out of fashion now, what with the whole 80s revival and people talking themselves seriously again, the fall of post-modernism and the limited expressionism offered by electronic communication (irony mark any one؟ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_ma… ), but it’s still one of my favourite devices.

Anyway, the reason for this hagiographic rant it that I heard some one rip the piss out of Alanis Morissette and her song Ironic (big ‘I’ ). Now I’ve heard a lot of people do this, some people have even made a career out of it ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1TVS… ), but they’re all wrong.

The thing is irony (little ‘i’ ) comes in many forms. The one most people think of is poetic irony, where an event that would otherwise be fortuitous, at that precise instance it happens, becomes dreadful. Finding a wining lottery ticket in the road and getting run over as you stoop to pick it up, that kind of thing. Granted, Ironic does not contain any instances of this. But there’s another type of irony, cosmic irony; that feeling that someone up there is toying with your life, using you as a plaything for their amusement. Now let’s have a quick look at Alanis’s lyrics that everyone skips over:

Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out when
You think everything's gone wrong and everything blows up
In your face

And isn't it ironic... don't you think
A little too ironic... and yeah I really do think...

And there we have it, Ironic isn’t about individual instances of irony, it is about all those unlikely instances letting us know that god is watching, and that he has a cruel sense of humour. Cosmic Irony.

Anyway, lecture over. Here are some of the pictures I found which I think display irony beautifully.

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