What do you call someone who doesn’t get Irony? American (or Canadian)!
What do Americans think irony is? Something you use on creased clothseys.
Definition: (Merriam Webster’s online dictionary) But basically think of Irony as luck with a twist.
I’m ranting about Irony because of something that really makes me MAD – that is Alanis Morrisette’s song Ironic. If you are unfamiliar with the song let me explain. The lady, who spent the three and half minutes of her first single “You Oughta know’ screaming at me because I was a man, decided to create a song illustrating that life has many unfortunate twists and turns (First error, irony isn’t always bad). I realise I’m not the first to point out some of the songs issue but like I said it bugs me.
The first verse has three examples:
1. A 98 yr old man who won the lottery and then died.
This isn’t ironic. What would be ironic is if he died from a heart attack after being told he’d won the lottery. Otherwise dying is just bad luck
2. Next Alanis tells us Ironic is a ‘Black Fly in your Chardonnay’.
Definitely only bad luck. What could be ironic is if you had spent a month searching for a specific species of Black Fly only to give up and console yourself with a glass of posers wine and there, floating on top, was the very species of black fly you had been fruitlessly searching for.
3. Finally for verse one we get: ‘It's a death row pardon two minutes too late’.
Two things to point out here: 1. It’s just bad luck again and 2. how would you know? Irony would be if you had campaigned your whole adult life to have the death penalty abolished but during a heated debate you accidentally knock over proponent of capital punishment who struck their head on the mock electric chair being used as a prop in the debate. The fallen person dies and you are tried for murder and get put on death row. Finally the federal government outlaws the death penalty but two minutes too late for you – the leading campaigner. That would be ironic.
OK this blog is going on too long but I hope you beginning to see what I’m getting at here. For instance, the chorus talks about ‘rain on your wedding day’. Wedding day rain is only ironic if you are a weather forecaster who forecasted good weather. ‘A free ride when you’ve already paid’ – then it’s not free is it? And ‘good advice you just didn’t take” again bad luck. Only Ironic if you’d taken every piece of advice offered by that person and it had all been wrong and the one piece you ignored was good.
My final complaint is the closing lines include the lyric ‘a little too ironic, don’t you think?’ This implies there are degrees of irony. Which I don’t really think there are, things are either ironic or not.
Sorry Alanis, but maybe if you hadn’t tried to make all men feel like shits in your first song I wouldn’t be so touchy about this now.
<Enter stunningly witty and clever tagline here>
Bazza
If you want to search for the lyrics please be careful many so called lyric sites are 'honey pots' crammed with malware.
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