Are there any actual examples of irony in the Alanis Morissette song, ‘Ironic’?
When Alanis Morissette sat down to write ‘Ironic’, the main thing that would have been on her mind was to generate a hit that would resonate with a global audience. The last thing on her mind was whether the song would go on to spark almost three decades of linguistic debate.
Throughout the track, the Canadian singer-songwriter reels off different scenarios which appear to describe a person or a group of individuals’ respective misfortunes, ranging from “rain on your wedding day” to “a black fly in your Chardonnay”.
They’re all things that one might not want to happen to them, perhaps the sort of small gripes that would frustrate someone for a few moments, but then Morissette poses the question in the pre-chorus that has irked prescriptivists around the world: “Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?”
The irony is, many of the situations that she describes in the song are not ironic in the slightest, which begs the question: did she ever really know what ‘ironic’ meant, and is the irony of writing a song about irony with little to no irony to speak of present in it lost on her? It’s the petty sort of thing that only an individual who gets wound up by incorrect grammar use or the introduction of neologisms would want to pick up on and berate a songwriter for misunderstanding, but are they even right to assert that there’s no irony in the song?
Morissette has been forced to apologise for her malapropism on numerous occasions, and has seen countless parodies of her song that poke fun at her poor interpretation of rhetorical devices, some of which she’s been involved in and taken in extremely good faith. But was any of that really necessary, and are there some genuine examples of irony hidden within the song that these sticklers for proper Englishing have missed?
Is there any irony in Alanis Morissette’s ‘Ironic’?
Aside from the point that was addressed earlier, in that the song itself is ironic as a result of its lack of irony, we need to dig deeper into the polysemy, or multiple meanings, of the word ‘ironic’.
If we take it at face value, as many have done, then the primary meaning of the word is to juxtapose reality against expectation. As much as you might not want it to happen, nobody actually orders a beverage with the explicit expectation that there won’t be a dead fly in it, so it isn’t ironic when you find one floating around in all of its groggy, wine-drunk shame. It would be ironic if the establishment you purchased the wine from was filled with venus fly traps, because the expectation is that there will be no flies there to crash-land in your drink.
List all of the other examples that she comes up with, of which there are ten in total, and you won’t find a single example of irony that fits this definition, but if you were to take it to mean using sarcasm as a comedic device where what is said is the opposite of what is meant, then there’s one example of irony in the song.
Throughout the second verse, she describes a scenario which ends in tragedy, and while the actual situation itself could be described as ironic in the first sense at a stretch, the second sense comes in at the end: “Mr Play-It-Safe was afraid to fly / He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye / He waited his whole damn life to take that flight / And as the plane crashed down he thought, ‘well, isn’t this nice?’” Under no circumstances does the imaginatively-named Mr Play-It-Safe actually think that plummeting to his death is nice, but he’s using irony to highlight the absurdity of the situation he’s finding himself in; he didn’t like flying, and he’s dying in a plane crash – how typical.
The thing is, there are even more ways of interpreting irony that have been glossed over, which we can break down into four separate types. The type utilised in the verse about a plane crash is what is known as ‘verbal irony’, which, as explained, is where the opposite meaning is applied to a statement that suggests otherwise. The other three types can all be classified as types of ‘situational irony’, which relates to ‘dramatic irony’, ‘cosmic irony’, and ‘romantic irony’.
With ‘dramatic irony’, the perceived audience is already privy to the outcome of a given situation that a character or subject is unaware of, and is forced to watch events unfold with this in mind as the character has to come to a realisation. Romeo’s death in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is an example of this, as we, the audience, know that the potion Juliet has ingested does not have fatal consequences for her, and is only meant to induce a comatose state. Romeo, on the other hand, doesn’t know this and chooses to take his own life upon realising his lover’s ‘death’, only for her to wake and discover the tragedy. This is a form of ‘dramatic irony’, which isn’t present in ‘Ironic’.
‘Cosmic irony’, and ‘romantic irony’, however, can be argued as being present, especially due to how their definitions overlap. While ‘cosmic irony’ means that an individual’s actions are thwarted by events beyond their control, ie, fate, ‘romantic irony’ is slightly different in that there is an author who is forcing these events upon an individual. If we were to interpret the events of ‘Ironic’ as real events, then ‘cosmic irony’ is perhaps the more applicable term, but considering that Morissette is the author behind these lyrics, she is ultimately the agent of irony, or the ironist, who is forcing these events upon the characters she has created, then this becomes an example of ‘romantic irony’.
While Morissette has admitted that she made a mistake in the song and didn’t list any real examples of irony, this is only in reaction to people who have berated her for not understanding irony, who themselves have not grasped the full range of how irony can exist. And yes, people complaining that a song about irony doesn’t feature any irony, only for there to be quite a few examples of irony in it after all, is ironic, don’t you think?
