Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

The article tortures its subject, while never really defining irony.

If we go by the dictionary, we see that regular people are using irony quite well:

(1) the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

That's a hipster wearing a hillbilly stgan t-shirt ironically, or someone lauding Epstein as a paragon of virtue, and so on. This kind is well undestood and people usually don't argue over its semantics.

(2) a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result.

This is the kind of irony the article is preoccupied with.

The key, I think, is the situation being "wryly amusing".

I'd say that this kind of irony involves some kind of a "cosmic joke" (a kind of soft or heavier prank the universe plays on you/us). Not literally of course: it's just how it feels.

This definition fits the dictionary definition (2) above, and the article cases, like the diabetic going for his meds and being run over by a sugar (or insulin, even better) truck.

And, let's say that contrary to popular "de-bunking", finding a trove of spoons when you're just looking for a knife (as in Alanis' lyrics), qualifies. As does "winning the lottery and diying the next day" or "a death row pardon two minutes too late" (also lyrics from the same song).

A lot of the semantic arguments against cases of (2) is mostly people expecting irony to always involve an element of (1), or to be necessarily much more than "wryly" amusing case of (2).

Try defining humor. You can write a book about it and it would still be missing the point. Since irony is part of humor, any attempt to define it is probably similarly problematic. So my advice would be to either let it rest, or to be prepared for some unsatisfactory conclusions.

Humor is the unit test suite of life.

That is, we validate our existential understanding by cracking jokes about all aspects thereof.

There's a brilliant book "Inside Jokes" where authors come up with a theory of humor that to a large degree relates to what you said. In short, humor is the way for the brain to debug itself.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inside-jokes

That makes a lot of sense.

I wonder if this is related to how some social justice “enthusiasts” have trouble with memes and jokes about their pet topics?

I disagree. At least for me the 'wryly amusing' needs the events to be connected. Like death row pardon just too late doesn't do that for me. Death row pardon too late because you were on death row for killing Telefon operator 'Speedy' does it.

Winning lottery and dying in your newly bought racing car, ok. Just dying, I do not see the irony.

But it might just be me, and probably as with taste one cannot really discuss that.

I think an important factor in irony is that it's an apparent opposition between two aspects of a situation that do not in fact affect each other.

So the diabetic being killed by the insulin truck is ironic, because the contents of the truck no not in fact affect the lethality of being hit by it.

But the death row pardon coming in too late isn't ironic, because the pardon actually could have prevented the death. Whereas your example of 'Speedy' is ironic, because the nickname of the victim has no causal effect on the speed of the pardon.

Examples where the two oposed aspects of the situation actually do affect each other aren't ironic, they're just an ordinary conflict

I think whether the two elements affect each other is orthogonal to the situation being ironic.

It can be an acausual relationship (e.g. as in the classic observation "it's ironic how the bus always arrives just when you light your cigarette").

Or it can be a casual relationship (e.g. "A marriage councelor in an unhappy marriage" or the article's "the diabetic down on his meds, being run over by an insulin truck"- that is the very thing that he seeked and that would helped his health).

Actually the 'always' implies a causal relationship. 'while I lit up mig cigarette, the bus arrived' is not ironic.

I agree with the sibling, I don't think it's _necessary_ for the contradictory aspects to have no casual link. There just has to be some kind of surprising contradiction, although maybe you tend to feel more entertained by the surprise when there is no obvious cause-and-effect.

To my mind a pardon that comes too late, or the lottery-bought racing car accident, are unfortunate but don't really hold a striking contradiction. That seems more significant than the causality.

>I disagree. At least for me the 'wryly amusing' needs the events to be connected.

They don't need to be connected casually. They are, however, connected, by pertaining to the same subject and e.g. having contradictory qualities (in the example the pardon vs execution, plus the amusing timing).

>Winning lottery and dying in your newly bought racing car, ok. Just dying, I do not see the irony.

The irony being that you were served this great luck just before you got handed the ultimate unluckiness (thus rendering it all useless to you).

> The irony being that you were served this great luck just before you got handed the ultimate unluckiness

The irony in crashing in your newly bought sports car (or private jet) is in the fact that you were longing for a lottery win your whole life, hoping that it will bring you happiness, but instead it brought you death.

Dying for a reason that is not directly related to your newly acquired wealth is something different.

That's in line with the definition I found in the Cambridge Dictionary: "Irony - a situation in which something which was intended to have a particular result has the opposite or a very different result."

Def. (1) is better as a definition of sarcasm. Irony is more general, and can be far more subtle than the employment of simple opposites.

Sarcarm is irony in the sense of (1) but more snarky and heavy handed. Sarcasm, in other words, is "dismissive/heavily mocking" irony.

>Irony is more general, and can be far more subtle than the employment of simple opposites.

Well, wearing an in-appropriate cultural outfit as per my example, can be quite subtle. It's not just a "simple opposite" (like a Dem wearing a MAGA hat), it can tie to all kinds of subtle knowledge of this or that subculture.

I’m not sure I’d consider a Dem wearing a MAGA hat or a hipster wearing a hillbilly shirt “ironic” because it’s not really usurping the viewers’ surface-level understanding of the message. Whereas I think several people wearing a “Think Different” shirt would be ironic because in trying to communicate that they think differently they’ve actually communicated how alike they are. What they’ve said on the surface is not at all what they’ve actually said. I think the MAGA hat dem example misses the critical two-different-messages aspect that makes something ironic.

Yes, the key quality of irony, as opposed to coincidence, is that in an ironic couplet, the second construct unwittingly reverses the first.

>I’m not sure I’d consider a Dem wearing a MAGA hat or a hipster wearing a hillbilly shirt “ironic” because it’s not really usurping the viewers’ surface-level understanding of the message.

Irony doesn't have to be some huge usurping, tho.

Same way a joke doesn't have to be good, it can also be a mediocre or bad joke.

"Sarcasm" is literally flesh-cutting. If it isn't meant to wound, it's not sarcasm.

It's true that "irony" is hard to pin down. But the excursions into explaining coincidence, parody and satire I found rather tedious - those terms don't need a whole podcast. They're straightforward words.

To me, Irony is best expressed in the telling of Euripides' "Iphigenia at Aulis" and what a complete – and classically tragic – irony her story was.

However, looking at Etymonline's definitions, I find myself in a difficult spot of having to rethink how Irony can be expressed:

eironeia "dissimulation, assumed ignorance,"...

https://www.etymonline.com/word/irony#etymonline_v_12234

So I thank you for sharing your thoughts because what you stated gave me pause: I agree with you in part, felt your conclusions are linked in a way, but it's clear that I have a long way to go to understand the topic.

That said, and from the article, "Coincidences involve juxtaposition and incongruity, but they aren’t counterfactual and don’t involve pretense." The syntax/logic statements in this sentence make my head spin :(

Beyond the book linked, if anyone has further suggestions on readings on Irony please share. Thank you.

You could almost call it _ironic_ that an article identifying a general failure to satisfactorily explain irony, itself fails to satisfactorily explain irony... ;)

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