What should irony look like?

Answer 1

Irony? Irony cannot be seen like a hand or a tree or a Yahoo Avatar. Irony, like love, cannot be touched or tasted. It can only be described and according to wikipedia...


Irony is understood as an aesthetic valuation by an audience, which relies on a sharp discordance between the real and the ideal, and which is variously applied to texts, speech, events, acts, and even fashion. All the different senses of irony revolve around the perceived notion of an incongruity, or a gap, between an understanding of reality, or expectation of a reality, and what actually happens.

Like...Man A holds a pie in hopes to hit man b with it. What is unknown to the audience and Man A is that Man b has a seltzer bottle and fires the contents of the bottle in Man A's face. Man A slips and falls lobbing the pie in the air. The Irony isn't the seltzer bottle but the fact that the pie falls not on Man A as the audience thinks it will, but on Woman A who was sitting between them.

This called comical Irony.

Tragic Irony, is most prominent in the story of Oedipus, who was told by a soothsayer that he'll kill his father and marry his mother. He ignores this prophesy and falls in love with an older woman who is married to the king. He kills the king, marries the woman only to find that the woman he married is his mother thus, the man he killed is his father.

Situational Irony can only be described in metaphor...A retired Train Engineer is killed when his car is hit by a locomotive or a firehouse catches on fire.

Answer 2

For Pete's sake! He showed up for the prom in a tuxedo with
both knees of his pants torn out!

Answer 3

An iron with a big red "y" like the YAHOO logo.