COMMENT | A lesson in irony

COMMENT | When I first started tutoring and lecturing the English language and literature, an early problem for this novice educator was to get university and college students, many of them with just a functional grasp of the language, to understand “irony” and the varied manifestations of it in writing and in literature, that what is said may not be what is meant or what will happen or indicate true motives, that the writer or character may be aware of or ignorant of irony.

It’s like lying? No. It’s being a hypocrite? No, it’s not hypocrisy. It’s sarcasm. Yes, in words, they may be rooted in the same emotion, but sarcasm is expressed with a bitter, caustic tone, a blunt weapon to express outrage, whereas irony uses wit to say one thing while suggesting another, eliciting a laugh to make its point.

How to know when irony is at play? Are there verbal signposts? Nope, it’s just a sense that should develop with maturity and experience, a sense that there is more behind words and actions, an acceptance that we will never really know anyone fully, if at all.

If I were teaching literature now, as an example of the two sides of one form of irony, I would go to Mark Anthony’s funeral speech where, in praising Brutus and his co-conspirators, 'all honourable men' being the oft-repeated refrain, he gets the Roman crowd to see them as guilty of regicide, lowdown stabbers-in-the-back. Mark Anthony wielded irony to win the crowd over to his point of view.

In contrast, where the speaker displays no sense of irony, I would refer to Azmin Ali’s ...