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,” ...

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 ...

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 ...

Fate plays cunning games, even in movies. Every good story, in one way or another, consists of a character’s goal and their obstacle. A character strives for something, and something gets in their way ...

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 ...

Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the ...

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 ...

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 ...