Volume 27, Issue 4

Sarcastic irony, uttered in four (within and between) gender-based settings, is used here as a tool to diagnose affective attitudes toward women. The kind of sarcasm tested here is an aggressive type of humor, whereby a speaker derides another individual, turning her or him into the victim of the humorous utterance. Finding this kind of irony less or more pleasing allows indexing between- and within-group attitudes. Participants were overall nonsexist, scoring low on sexism scales, but male participants were still more sexist than female participants. Results show that, as predicted by Ariel and Giora (1998), female participants fully adopted a feminine point of view, enjoying sarcastic irony best when it was directed by women at men and least when it was directed by women at women. Being more sexist, our male participants adopted a feminine point of view only partially, enjoying sarcastic irony more when directed at men than directed at women, regardless of the speaker's gender.

Irony is often related to humor, both in spoken and written language. One possibility is that humor arises once people reconcile the incongruity between what speakers say and imply when using irony. Humor automatically emerges in these cases given the release of tension following a momentary sense of disparity. Our claim is that this proposal does not capture many of the dynamic complexities in real-world ironic discourse. We describe psychological research on irony understanding showing that ironic meanings are not always understood via a process of drawing conversational implicatures. Studies on people's spontaneous laughter when using irony suggest that the recognition of incongruity between what is said and implied is not necessary for eliciting humor. Laughter occurs at various places in conversation, and not necessarily at the end of speakers' utterances. People also laugh for reasons other than humor, such as to signal affiliation. Overall, finding the humor in irony is not the same as seen in simple jokes, and demands examination of a complex host of contextual factors not always considered in linguistic theories of humor.

This paper presents a contrastive approach to the presence of two distinct types of verbal irony in real (natural, unscripted) versus fictional (scripted) discourse, with a special focus on irony blindness, i.e. the inability to recognize ironic utterances. Irony strategies are categorized into two general types, based on the relationship between the expressed and the intended meaning (Type 1: meaning reversal and Type 2: meaning replacement). First, the differences between these two types are discussed in terms of use, interpretation, and misinterpretation. It is found that the first type of irony strongly prevails in natural discourse, while the second type is considerably more present in fictional discourse than it is in natural discourse. At the same time, the first type of irony appears to be more at risk of misinterpretation in natural discourse, as opposed to the second type, which seems to be a safer (even though less frequently selected) option. These findings are then further analyzed in light of the discussion concerning fictional (comedic, in particular) irony blindness and the construction and role of the irony-blind characters. Interestingly, the causes of fictional irony blindness are found to correlate more strongly with the (more humorous) misinterpretation of the second type of irony.

This paper takes as its bedrock a neo-Gricean definition of the trope of irony, championing two essential conditions for diagnosing its presence: overt untruthfulness (or pretence) arising from flouting the first maxim of Quality, together with evaluative implicature, i.e., implied (negative) evaluation. The paramount aim here is to delineate the boundaries of humorous irony, a term frequently overused both in everyday discourse and in academic research, vis-à-vis a range of distinct humor forms. Arguing in favour of a need for terminological and conceptual rigidity, the author indicates a few types of humor (teasing, absurdity, parody, and sarcasm) and potentially humorous phenomena (bald-faced lying, as well as metaphor, hyperbole and metonymy) which appear to meet at least one of the two conditions and, as a result, tend to be mistakenly labeled as (humorous) irony. The theoretical discussion is illustrated with humorous examples taken from the television series House .

Many pragmatic accounts of irony were proposed over the last decades. The best known may be the Gricean approach (Grice 1989a, 1989b), the echoic account (Sperber and Wilson 1981, 1995 [1986]; Wilson 2006, 2009) and the pretense theory (Clark and Gerrig 1984). These approaches state that irony consists in communicating the opposite, echoing or pretending, respectively. My aim here is to show that what defines verbal irony is something subtler: an overt clash between contents is the only thing that we shall find in every ironic utterance. On a different level, the relationships between irony and criticism on the one hand, and irony and humor on the other, have also been of great interest to authors working in the field. Different positions are defended regarding these two issues: here I will claim that criticism is an essential condition for ironic utterances, whereas humor is a consequence of some basic characteristics of irony.

This paper adopts the relevance-theoretic account of irony to describe the features of humorous irony and to elucidate the nuances of its failure. In connection to the humorous potential of irony, a number of properties it shares with some types of humor are discussed, such as exploiting incongruity, being targeted at a victim, being creative, carrying an element of surprise, involving metarepresentational abilities, and establishing a bond between the speaker and hearer. It is further observed that ironic utterances produced for the purpose of generating humor and increasing rapport between interlocutors may fail to achieve this aim to various degrees and due to a number of causes. Analyses of several examples indicate that the various causes of ironic misfires can be traced to failures of the inferential processes postulated by Relevance Theory as responsible for communicating irony: identifying a dissociative propositional attitude, representing the content of the proposition echoed, and attributing it to a source. Besides, it is claimed that humorous irony is used not only to communicate an attitude but also to have it accepted by the hearer, which is why the latter's rejection of the speaker-envisaged ironic attitude counts as another type of irony failure.