Irony/Quotes

"'It's like rain on your wedding day.' Only if you're marrying a weatherman and he set the date."

—Ed Byrne, showing he doesn't understand Cosmic Irony

"Define irony: a bunch of idiots dancing around on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash."

—Garland Greene, Con Air

"That's where the actual meaning is the exact opposite of the literal meaning."

—Reality Bites

"Irony: The one form of humor that everyone thinks they understand, when actually no one really does. Truly, it is the cleverest joke ever played on mankind."

—Surviving the World, Lesson 618

"'The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention'! Now that! Is! Irony!"

—Bender, Futurama

"I think it would be ironic if everyone was made of iron."

—Caboose, Red vs. Blue

"You say, isn't it terrible about global warming? And I say, no, it's funny. We're going to bring on global warming because we ran too many leaky air conditioners? We used too much spray deodorant, so now we'll be doomed to sweat forever? That's not sad. That's irony. Note to Alanis: That is ironic."

—Marco, Animorphs #15: The Escape

"Say a diabetic man is worried about being killed by sugar all the time. Every aspect of his life is about controlling his blood sugar so he won't die. This man is killed by a truck. That is not ironic, it is tragic. Killed by a truck delivering sugary doughnuts? That is hysterical, but not ironic. Killed by a truck delivering insulin? That is fucking ironic."

—George Carlin

"The upper echelons of irony should always include measures of sincerity. And if the satirical practice is executed faithfully it will achieve something bona fide in its own right regardless. Through an intense commitment bordering on religious devotion to the absolutely inane, absurd, or plain fucking stupid, a very different kind of sincerity begins to materialize. One of reverence to the ridiculous. You begin to 'mean it,' but what exactly it is you mean is never quite what appears on the surface, and is utterly inaccessible to obtuse and literal minds. That you 'mean it' then becomes inseparable from the joke, and additional rich strata of humor may be stripped aggressively from this irreconcilable truth."

—Dirk Strider, Homestuck

The new day heralded by no daily papere, only by the rising sun; and the State, the churches, the peopled empires, war, and the rumors of war, and the arts, all gone silent as in the days ere they were invented.

—Robert Louis Stevenson on visiting an obscure place called Midway Island, that was later associated with other things besides tranquility.

Kreese: You know what I don't get? I don't get why they call him Little Eddie when he's so fucking big.
Howard: I think its supposed to be ironic.
Kreese: ...What?
Howard: You know, the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning, usually a humorous or sardonic literary style or form.
Kreese: ...You got beat up in school a lot, didn't you?

Howard: ...Yes.

—From MadWorld

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