In the Futurama episode "The Devils Hands are Idle Playthings" , Fry makes a deal with the Robot Devil to exchange his hands with that of a random robot. A massive wheel is spun to decide on the unlucky robot. In the end, it comes lands on the Robot Devil, who says "Oh what an appallingly ironic outcome." Bender replies, "That's not ironic, it's coincidental." Indeed, it isn't ironic, it is just a cruel coincidence. The Robot Devil is happy to screw over any other robot, but ends up screwing himself over. My friend SmickD considers this the "car dealer who sells cars with bad breaks getting run over by one of these cars" kind of irony, which I call "Comeuppance".
Most people have an inherent concept of karma. The feeling that bad people should get what is coming to them. The previous post about the astrology magazine has a good bit of this. The Robot Devil is an evil character who gets screwed over by random chance, and this makes people think all is right with the world. Anyone could have died when the car's breaks stopped working, but it happened to kill the dirty car salesman, meaning that bad things do happen to bad people, and all is right with the world. Of course, if you said, "that's great, I enjoy vengeance", it would sound bad, so you say, "how ironic".
This is what I call Karmatic irony. Tomorrow we'll examine the slightly different type of irony which I call "Coincidental", or attempting to apply sense to random events.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Main Entry: iro·ny
Pronunciation: \ˈī-rə-nē also ˈī(-ə)r-nē\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural iro·nies
Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eirōnia, from eirōn dissembler
Date: 1502
1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony
2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony
synonyms see wit
Sourced from the online version of Merriam Webster English Dictionary
So by that definition, every time someone wins a lottery, it is ironic. This functionally makes number 3 a useless definition, because given the enormous number of events which occur every day to a person, many improbably things are bound to happen, and all of them are ironic. This is why I don't think such a definition should exist.
Not only is it an overly broad definition, it doesn't validate the assertion that it's a form of irony (in the example cited).
Brakes not breaks.
what pointless quibbling
Post a Comment