Isn't It Ironic, Dontcha Think?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh Clark** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and JerBear's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the irony edition.

**Charles W. Bryant** (0:25)
I think so.

**Josh Clark** (0:26)
Oh, sorry.
Let me try again. The Isn't It Ironic, Don't You Think edition.

**Charles W. Bryant** (0:34)
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you are our age or above, maybe a few below.

**Josh Clark** (0:42)
Or a weird younger person.

**Charles W. Bryant** (0:44)
Yeah, you might have made fun of Alanis Morissette for that whole thing, because I remember at the time, like people dissing on that song because they were like, basically none of what she mentions is ironic.

**Josh Clark** (0:55)
No, rain on your wedding day. I mean, yes, it's not expected, but it can be, you know, it's a pretty, it's very possible. It's just bad luck in that situation. That's one good example. Yeah. What else? A free ride when you're already there.
I don't even know what that means. No, not really. No. Basically nothing that she said was technically ironic. But the fact that Alanis Morissette, Canada's greatest hero, felt okay with basically saying, this is all irony and ironic, so much so that I'm going to name my song ironic.

**Charles W. Bryant** (1:32)
Yeah.

**Josh Clark** (1:34)
That just goes to show how wide open everyone's interpretation of what irony is.

**Charles W. Bryant** (1:43)
Yeah. I mean, it's notoriously hard to define. Olivia helped us with this, and the other cultural example she gave initially was, Reality Bites.
And in that movie, it's like, it's not a plot point, but, I mean, it's sort of not a plot point, but at some point, Winona Ryder is asked to define irony, and she really can't. And then Ethan Hawke, who at the time was supposed to be like this super cool guy, but that movie, the way that movie has aged, like you look back and you're like, he was kind of a big jerk in that movie.

**Josh Clark** (2:15)
Yeah. I saw something about that, that Ben Stiller was actually the nice guy, but he was part of the establishment, where Ethan Hawke was not nice, but he was like the cool dude. But he was like the guy that she wanted, right?

**Charles W. Bryant** (2:28)
Yeah. That's the irony of the movie. But yeah, Ethan Hawke, he kind of makes her feel dumb by defining irony really plainly.
It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning, which is, you know, at the time, it seemed like, oh, how clever. But it's really not. Just to read some explicit definition of one type of irony to prove you're smart is, they missed the mark in retrospect.

**Josh Clark** (2:52)
Sure. And even still, like, he's talking about such a narrow definition of irony that he might as well just kept his darn mouth shut.

**Charles W. Bryant** (3:03)
Yeah, but that's kind of, like you said, the whole point of this is a really hard thing to define. I think Livia did a great job with a tough topic.
And like, you know, looking at it from a historical perspective, I think helps.

**Josh Clark** (3:18)
Yeah, I just want to jump in. I was silent and I didn't agree, but I want to say Livia did a great job with this. I think this was a bit of a vision quest, maybe, for her. I don't know if that's the right term, but it was a very difficult assignment. Yeah.

**Charles W. Bryant** (3:36)
You've been throwing out a lot of these very esoteric topics lately.

**Josh Clark** (3:40)
Yeah. I don't know why, I guess.
I don't know why. I know you think it's because I just turned 50, but I don't think that's it.

**Charles W. Bryant** (3:47)
I wasn't going to say that.

**Josh Clark** (3:49)
Okay. Well, at any rate, yeah, this is something that I've wanted to do for a while. And some people have written in and asked for it, but I think one of the reasons I wanted to tackle it is because I don't know exactly what it is. But also in the myriad ways that it's played a really big role in shaping society. In fact, there's this whole schism between the ironic and people who resent the ironic, as we'll see, that dates back hundreds of years. So let's get into it, Chuck, because irony is nothing new. Like the 90s Gen X slackers didn't invent it.

**Charles W. Bryant** (4:27)
No, not at all. The term itself comes from a character actually, not really a thing yet. In classical Greek, I guess drama, the character was E-I-R-O-N with a little rooftop over the O.