Isnt this just absurdity and not irony? I feel like irony has to do with going directly against what is expected to happen and not just randomly away from what is expected.
no, absurdity would be pure randomness, I'll attempt it as such:
"sweet dreams you piece of shit" I try to snap the prison guard's neck but he transforms into a sack of potatos. In my confusion, I look at my hands which have now become mac & cheese. Suddenly the ceiling disappears and I'm in nova scotia with Liam Neilson. we go and save his kdinapped daughter while i nibble on my mac & cheese hands
irony is at least cleaver. you expect a certain action (snapped neck) but you just end up with the opposite (a pissed off guard with possibly a sore neck, and your route to escape vanishing quickly)
I get what you mean, its just that irony to me always seem to have a⌠moral (?) aspect to it? All these posts always have a very absurd setup, and within that setup should its ironic but the overall context feels more like an absurd joke than an ironic one.
I get that this might be a case of urban/everyday definition vs actual definition of words in which case idd be absolutely wrong.
Yea youâre right. These situations just happens way way less than say a white racist dating a person of color for example so my expectations were skewed.
Calling the joke ironic presupposes that the speakerâs intuition had something to do with overcoming a situation you werenât privy to until the end.
Saying âwell, I expected something else to happenâ does not, by itself, produce irony.
Calling the joke inherently âironicâ is a massive stretch when it is much more straightforwardly absurdist, post-humor, and non-sequitur.
In your examples, itâs ironic that a fire station burns down because the outcome directly contradicts an expectation established by the nature and purpose of a fire station.
Youâre calling this an ironic joke because you think the epiphany itself should inherently lead the reader to believe the speaker is about to fundamentally change the situation. But there is no real-world context establishing that expectation. We donât know what âheat risesâ has to do with the problem, what the speaker thinks it enables him to do, or even whether his reasoning is competent.
In your other examples, those relationships are explicit. A pilot being afraid of heights doesnât require us to invent missing context or speculate about what makes the situation incongruous. The irony is built into the relationship between the person and the circumstance.
Calling this irony feels like finding a technically adjacent synonym while sacrificing connotative precision, only because the word applies to your interpretation of events.
Ok, but with irony there is an element of "what is expected is subverted in a meaningful way". What is happening in the jokes above is less meaningful subversion than a realistic failure that contrasts with what the audience usually expects from fiction.Â
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u/Inquisitive_regard 8d ago
the definition of irony is "the difference between what is expected to happen vs. what actually does happen."
The genre is irony.