E30: re:blurb - Irony

In this re:blurb episode, producers and co-hosts Alex and Calvin are re:joined by contributor and co-producer Sophie to discuss the many kinds of Irony, and the unique ways in which this form of humor manifests itself on our favorite website, twitter dot com.

First, we review the three main kinds of irony most often taught in schools--verbal, situational, and dramatic--all of which ask us to hold understandings of multiple, sometimes contradictory “realities” against one another. While the irony we encounter in literature tends to be “stable,” with one clear interpretation, in everyday discourse we are more often met with “unstable” irony, which invites a multitude of possible interpretations.

Or discussion of unstable irony leads us to “irony poisoning,” an emerging trend in online discourse in which people become so accustomed to edgy humor they adopt the premise of unstable irony as a worldview. But we also consider whether Irony might have the potential to open us up to new ways of viewing the world, turning to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Rorty to discuss “Ironism,” a philosophy that holds all truths as partial truths, so that no one way of seeing the world can be considered absolute. We point out that this ironist worldview can be instructive when using rhetoric to articulate our views of reality and our place within it.

Finally, for a more practical discussion of these different conceptions of irony, we turn to several examples plucked from twitter, and consider the various ways we see irony being deployed in online discourse.

A partial transcript for this episode can be found here.

Tweets Referenced in Analysis:

Alex’s Example: The “Hot Take” / Plausible Deniability Combo

https://twitter.com/mattzeitlin/status/1178701629060722688

https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1178739225312800775

Sophie’s Examples

Baby Yoda Tattoo Hoax: https://twitter.com/boring_as_heck/status/1202395122064904193

Wealthy Boomer “Claps Back” at Millenials: https://twitter.com/Swarthyface/status/1194461368709074945

Calvin’s Examples

“Extremely normal”: https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/942836994257891328

“You Hate to See It”: https://twitter.com/MalaikaJabali/status/1195552337651257344

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Booth, W. C. (1974). A rhetoric of irony. University of Chicago Press.

Nietzsche, F. (originally published 1896) On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense. Retrieved from: http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_7421.pdf

Rorty, R. M. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge University Press.

Tobin, V., & Israel, M. (2012). Irony as a viewpoint phenomenon. Viewpoint in language: A multimodal perspective, 25-46.

Further Reading on Irony:

Carston, R., & Wearing, C. (2015). Hyperbolic language and its relation to metaphor and irony. Journal of Pragmatics, 79, 79-92.

Gibbs, R. W., & Colston, H. L. (Eds.). (2007). Irony in language and thought: A cognitive science reader. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Renegar, V. R., & Sowards, S. K. (2003). Liberal irony, rhetoric, and feminist thought: A unifying third wave feminist theory. Philosophy & rhetoric, 36(4), 330-352.

Tobin, V. (2016). Performance, irony, and viewpoint in language. In Blair, R. & Cook, A. (eds.), Theatre, performance and cognition: Language, bodies, and ecologies (pp. 54-67). Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1992). On verbal irony. Lingua, 87(1), 53-76.