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,” ...

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 ...

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 ...

Life has a wicked sense of humor. Just when you expect one thing, reality delivers the exact opposite — and somehow, that gap between expectation and outcome is endlessly fascinating. Whether it’s a ...

Try a pun or some sarcasm on a toddler and you’re likely to draw a blank stare. Babies can be even harder to impress – ignoring your best clown impressions while laughing at some completely random ...

Hypocrisy means contradicting ourselves, being inconsistent, and talking out of both sides of our mouths. But that’s also what irony means. What then distinguishes hypocrisy from irony? A hypocrite ...

Alanis Morissette isn’t particularly concerned about the fact that plenty of people have a problem with the lyrics in her 1995 hit “Ironic,” which describe several scenarios – none of which is a pure ...

If irony abounds, but no one notices, does that mean irony is dead? Or does it mean we’re living in the most ironic of all possible worlds? That’s the question that comes to mind watching the ...