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,” ...

Like simile, metaphor, personification and hyperbole, irony is a very useful figure of speech. Writers and other creative workers regularly make use of it, including comedians. It can, however, also ...

As the great British comic, Ricky Gervais once implied, England and America may not so much be divided by a common tongue, but by their distinctive use (and in the case of the Brits, their abuse) of ...

From William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “The Book of Mormon,” the power of irony transcends genres and ...

On September 18, 2001, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, declared, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.” He was trashed for the sentiment. Only a month after the event, Michiko Kakutani ...

The cliché: Each year as we revisit 9/11, commentators and critics recall the "death of irony" that was widely trumpeted in the days after the attack. This year, the mentions, as with the 9/11 ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

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 ...

Successful couples are not couples who never fight or are on everything at every moment. Often, couples who never fight have concealed issues or have made a decision, privately or not, that there is ...