This chapter discusses the philosopher Richard Rorty’s influential writings on the contingent nature of ironic thinking and expression. Rorty argued that irony does not reveal foundational truths, but is employed to help us “depict the world through multiple points of view.” Irony provides a way of individually recreating the world for ourselves rather than offering a special device to demystify assumptions about reality that somehow exists outside of language. Rorty’s claimed that writers such as Proust, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida are ironists given their questions about the stories and vocabularies we inhabit. Literature is especially useful for creating spaces for irony as sites for creative, nonjudgmental self-examination. But philosophy is also a kind of playful ironic writing that helps us to create useful redescriptions of the world and our roles in it. Colebrook emphasizes that Rorty rejected the idea that irony is just a trope in which one thing is said and another is meant. Irony is “the very opposite of searching for essences,” which is why it is so important for understanding liberalism with its emphasis on the “politics of tolerance, anti-foundationalism, and freedom of speech.”

This chapter describes how children learn to produce and understand irony. Children do not usually understand irony very well until age 6 or so, a developmental process that continues to unfold throughout childhood. Pexman explores how children’s developing cognitive and linguistic skills (e.g., theory of mind abilities, specific language skills, executive functions related to metarepresentaitonal reasoning, emotion recognition, and epistemic vigilance) are critical to their becoming competent in understanding irony. Research on adults’ irony understanding suggests that part of children’s irony abilities may be explained via the parallel-constraint-satisfaction (PCS) theory that demonstrates how language, quite generally, is comprehended via the online integration of multiple discourse and sociocultural cues. Pexman discusses new findings from studies that may offer greater precision in detailing exactly how both children and adults detect and combine various cues in a predictive manner to quickly infer the complexities of ironic messages. She also sketches out several concrete directions for future experimental studies to better understand when and how children understand irony.

This chapter explores the ways irony unfolds in music. Turner and DiBernardo examine representative pop songs, both original compositions and cover versions, to suggest several ways that irony is created and perhaps detected by listeners. As they argue, “Musical irony requires an interpretive ear for hearing contradictory or disjunctive sounds (and lyrics) within a musical context.” But inferring irony from music involves a special challenge given that music lacks it own semantic or representational signification. Lyrics are clearly a driving force in expressing ironic intent, but instrumental sounds often interact with the spoken words to convey richer ironic complexes, including both rhetorical and situational ironies. Listeners may be especially attentive to the tension, or the discrepancy, between the musical form, style, or genre of a song (e.g., the upbeat, lyrical form in Randy Newman’s song “Political Science”) and its lyrical content (e.g., the use of weapons of mass destruction). Many musical ironies may be “post-modern” because of their self-referential style (e.g., not just criticizing others, but ourselves as well). This chapter offers a compelling, beautifully detailed, argument that “music is a largely underexplored wellspring of ironic activity.”

This chapter describes the main themes of the volume, including “the scope of irony” (the diverse ways that irony is manifested in human experience), “irony’s impact” (e.g., the complex ways irony affects both personal and social life), “irony in linguistic communication,” “irony, affect, and related figures,” and “irony in expressive, multimodal contexts.” Taking a close look at chapters from different sections of the volume illustrates some of the incredibly diverse ways of studying, and writing, about irony in human life. We urge readers to pay close attention to the examples discussed, methods employed by different scholars, the way their arguments unfold, and their larger aims to address the ways irony and thought are closely intertwined. And we should remain open to being “shaken up” by what is read for the wide world of irony scholarship can disrupt our preconceived notions about the meaning and functions of irony exactly in the ways that irony itself can “piece illusions” about how we see ourselves, each other, and the world around us.

This chapter describes the contribution that grammatical constructions may have in detecting ironic intent in discourse. Constructions are very flexible devices that can be “manipulated” by speakers for specific communicative purposes, including instances where people “play” with or even “violate” the rules of grammar. Her specific focus on rhetorical questions (e.g., “How about another piece of pie?” said to someone who has already eaten more than his share of the pie) reveals how irony allows speakers to present alternatives that balance between accepting and rejecting a particular frame, or understanding of some situation. Rhetorical questions can both appear to accept some frame (e.g., the addressee is invited to have another piece of pie) and cancel or negate it (e.g., the addressee should not have another piece of pie given how much he has already eaten), which together often sets the stage for intense awareness of irony. Rhetorical questions (e.g., “How can I stand this stupid world without a mobile phone?”) also have diplomatic functions, because they allow people to express one socially accepted frame (e.g., mobile phones are necessary) while also challenging this belief through the evocation of irony (e.g., mobile phones are annoying, yet addictive).

This chapter explores the social, political, and legal implications of irony use. People do not simply employ irony for the sake of expressing ironical meanings alone, but use irony, especially in public spheres, to communicate a variety of pragmatic, or perlocutionary, messages. Many verbal ironies convey meanings that are strategically negotiated to affect different social, political, and legal outcomes. Irony often has significant, concrete consequences in real-life discourse contexts. Simpson presents various attested examples to exemplify how irony may be differently enacted in private and public spheres of communication, but can also be readily transferred, and sometimes transformed, from private conversations to larger public discussions. He appeals to critical discourse analysis as one possible approach to uncovering the social work that irony often accomplishes (e.g., power and ideology), and outlines some of the perils and pitfalls of irony in different discourse contexts (e.g., public sports conversations, legal discourse, politics, twitter). Simpson ends with a fascinating exploration of whether irony may be “the last refuge of the scoundrel,” a place inhabited by some politicians who appear to use irony as an option in any difficult situation where they must “apologize-or-deny-or-ironize.”

Pictorial irony is another example of nonverbal irony. This chapter addresses the need for experimental work on these topics in light of the view that irony is deeply tied to human cognition and not just language. Katz examines different ways of distinguishing between irony and sarcasm, particularly in terms of “vector space theory,” which suggests that sarcasm is more aggressive, dark, and mocking than is irony. Additional empirical analyses note important distinctions in defining the notions of verbal vs. situational irony. Katz then applies his “constraint-satisfaction” model to create an open-ended list of visual features that likely signal the presence of irony or sarcasm in visual, including pictorial, displays. Katz argues that basic psychological processes involved in scene perception, which have deep evolutionary roots, are employed when people infer either sarcastic or ironic intents in pictures (including pictures with and without accompanying words). At the same time, similar psychological processes used in detecting pretense or echoic mention within language can also be adopted for understanding visual scenes as conveying sarcasm or irony. Expertise with some visual medium, such as painting, may enhance people’s abilities to readily interpret these as expressing irony in different ways.

This chapter examines the possibility that hyperbole and understatement are distinct notions and not necessarily under the superordinate concept of irony. Hyperbole relates to exaggeration or overstatement, while understatements are viewed as scalar shifts that are quite the opposite of hyperbole (i.e., presenting something as less significant than it is). She examines empirical evidence on the discourse goals associated with irony, hyperbole, and understatement to suggest that irony is frequently a part of hyperbole and understatement (e.g., to achieve the goals of contrast, expectations, and indeterminacy), but can exist on its own (e.g., to achieve the goal of an ironic attitude through evaluation accounts, negative-attitude accounts, and dissociative-attitude accounts). Both hyperbole and understatement are also evaluative, but not necessarily in an ironic way. Most generally, understatement and hyperbole may share common mechanisms with irony, yet are still important rhetorical figures in their own right.

The sound of people’s voices when speaking to others is sometimes a clue to their possible ironic intent. This chapter presents an overview of some of the specific vocal strategies employed when people express ironic meaning. Speakers signal their ironic intentions through local and global features of prosody, along with vocal impressions (e.g., spectral information that depicts a different person or imagined agent), laughter, and other nonverbal vocalizations. Experimental studies demonstrated that these vocal strategies are key indices for listeners when they infer that speakers convey irony, including sarcasm, through their talk. Bryant describes the evolutionary roots of these different vocalizations (e.g., the desire for play) and argues how vocal strategies are an important element in how people coordinate and cooperate during verbal interaction. He emphasizes that different vocal strategies are not fixed, but vary in different situations to create a wide range of contextually appropriate pragmatic messages that others may readily interpret.

Irony is a complex phenomenon that may rely on several different forms of thought which are routinely relied on in verbal and nonverbal communication. This chapter outlines a theory of the “cognitive operations” that underlie the possible production and understanding of ironic meaning. These cognitive operations (e.g., strengthening and mitigation, expansion and reduction) are critical in the expression and interpretation of many figures of speech (e.g., metaphor, metonymy) and may provide the basis for a more general theory of meaning construction. Mendoza Ibáñez focuses primarily in this chapter, however, on ironic echoing, which allows speakers to pretend to be in agreement with some previously stated utterance or presumed thought. He considers many of the formal complexities of ironic echoing to demonstrate their varying, often subtle, communicative effects. His analysis also suggests how attention to cognitive operations may provide the theoretical basis for unifying verbal and situational irony.

Foreign judges often face a challenge when interpreting a constitution in ways that respond to local context. That challenge can be overcome if due diligence is exercised by paying close attention to how the constitution is inherently intertwined with the customs of the land. Ultimately there is an expectation that precedents established by foreign judges should reflect the values of the Indigenous population in shaping the legal system. In many instances in Micronesia foreign judges did the opposite: they often brought with them assumptions that were contradictory to customary principles, and in the process contributed to the devaluation of customary practices as enshrined in the Constitution. The case of the Federated States of Micronesia illustrates the erosion of customary values as American judges asserted control over the legal system by importing American jurisprudential practices and treating customary law as inferior to black letter law. Today Micronesian judges are working towards striking the balance between black letter and Indigenous customary legal principles in adherence to Micronesia’s Constitution.