Adapted from "Irony and Sarcasm" by Roger Kreuz (MIT Press, 2020). Reprinted with permission from MIT Press. In February 1996, Alanis Morissette released the fourth single from “Jagged Little Pill,” ...

Like simile, metaphor, personification and hyperbole, irony is a very useful figure of speech. Writers and other creative workers regularly make use of it, including comedians. It can, however, also ...

From William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “The Book of Mormon,” the power of irony transcends genres and ...

Fate plays cunning games, even in movies. Every good story, in one way or another, consists of a character’s goal and their obstacle. A character strives for something, and something gets in their way ...

Two-hundred-something years ago, after the earnestly murderous trials of the French Revolution, irony appeared on the cobblestoned streets of Paris. Young aristocratic men called Incroyables took to ...

I don't know if there's any type of tension that's more fun for an audience than dramatic irony. Dramatic irony occurs when your audience knows something that some or all of the characters in a film ...

On September 18, 2001, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, declared, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.” He was trashed for the sentiment. Only a month after the event, Michiko Kakutani ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

A recent hipster-hating New York Times column got this pop-cultural moment exactly backwards. Cultural critics love hypothesizing about hipsters. And certainly hipsters make for useful lab rats if you ...