I love comedy in all its forms and it irks me when I see people use the term “irony” in the wrong way. My favourite meaning of the word is:

“Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs”

Getting to school late on the day when you’re supposed to hand in an essay, and the car broke down; that is not irony, that’s a misfortune.

Seeing a random dog walks by and it looks sadly at you after you left your house without patting your own dog before you left, that’s not irony, that’s a coincidence.

Criticising someone’s grammar or spelling being bad when the person is talking vehemently about, say, animal rights, is not ironic, that’s grammar nazi-ing (though it would be ironic if you criticise someone’s topic on grammar and spelling when the post contains terrible grammar and spelling. I think the best example is when people rave on about how people have bad “grammer” :P).

Which makes me sad that the only (popular) song called “Ironic” by Alanis Morisette… doesn’t have an ounce of irony in any of the examples that it gives! From the first stanza:

“An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day”

That’s not irony! What WOULD be ironic was if (for example) the old man had cheated the lottery ticket from another person by killing them, then before he could claim the money, he died.

“It’s a traffic jam when you’re already late
It’s a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break”

That is also a misfortune! Again, the situation would actually be ironic if (for example) you are the traffic conductor who coordinated the traffic lights to be green so you can go, but you had made the situation worse by having done that. There’s almost something karmic about irony. All the examples she gives are tragic misfortunes and not actually ironic in any way, even though she names the entire song to be about it. Isn’t THAT ironic, don’t you think?

A visual example of irony: The Tree of Irony (<3 PBF).