University of Helsinki

It's ironic, isn't it?

Why do we go to the trouble of hiding the real meaning in what we say? To stay alive, to start with.

Irony has always been a feature of language. In his pamphlet written in 1729, A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick, the Irish writer Jonathan Swift proposed a perfect solution to the poverty, famine and overpopulation of Ireland. Feeding Irish babies to the gentry for a good price would solve the problem of poverty, hunger, abortion and the fertile Catholics. Even domestic violence would decrease, since men would stop beating their wives as they would suddenly have become more valuable.

There have always been those, too, who do not understand irony. Many took Swift’s pamphlet seriously and abhorred his preposterous cruelty. “It is always a risk to say something that on the surface is not politically correct,” says the linguist Toini Rahtu. “The more irony you dare to use, the more you have to trust that the other person is able and willing to comprehend what you mean. A speaker who uses irony assumes that he or she has enough common ground with the listener so that the hidden meaning will be understood. If the irony is understood, it will strengthen the bond amongst a group. Those who get the irony form an inner circle.”

This is one of the motives for us to take the trouble to use ambiguous expressions. Irony also helps us to exclude some listeners from the discourse.“Parents may use irony or language play when they do not want their children to understand the conversation,” says Rahtu.

The concept of irony has several meanings and categories. There is Socratic, dramatic, historical and situational irony, to mention a few. In Classical rhetoric, an ironic expression is defined as one that says one thing but means another. A simple example is to say “nice weather” when the weather is really bad.

The word irony can also be used in a meaning referred to as the irony of fate. In the irony of fate, someone compares two events and sees an ironic connection between them. In this case, irony is not, in other words, created by a human agent; it seems as if cosmic powers or fate are ridiculing us poor humans. Irony of fate is what happens in a situation such as that of the developer of the electric chair who was later sentenced to death for murder and met his end in a version that he had himself helped improve. Irony of fate is usually about an amazing coincidence or bad luck.

In totalitarian countries, irony is a popular and often the only possible way of expressing criticism against the powers that be. “In countries with no freedom of speech, irony gives security. You can always claim that the hidden ironic meaning was never there.”

Rahtu remembers that she once noticed when travelling in communist Poland, how much irony Polish poster art employed. “Irony was very obvious in posters. There was always something askew, some detail, which did not fit the ‘official’ message of the image,” Rahtu says.

Where are the limits of irony?

In her recently completed doctoral dissertation Sekä että – ironia koherenssina ja inkoherenssina (Irony as coherence and incoherence), Rahtu has sought the limits of irony by comparing the characteristics of ironic expressions to other modes of language that come close. Rahtu has defined the limits of irony in relation to, for example, direct mockery and politeness. She developed five components which reveal whether an expression is ironic or not. “An ironic expression is negative and ambiguous. Moreover, it has a target, a victim and the intention of the ironist,” Rahtu says.

The ambiguity in an ironic expression depends on one or several of these components being hidden. Direct mockery, in turn, is negative, it has a target, a victim and the intention of the speaker, but the way it is expressed is unambiguous,” Rahtu says. Hence, it is not irony.

Irony can be explained as an interpretive strategy through the concept of coherence. “Anyone who produces and interprets language, aims to understand it, to create coherence, that is, an interpretation that makes sense in the situation and textual context. Irony is one of the strategies by which an incoherent content or way of expression can be seen to make sense. If, for example, you praise an obviously flawed thing as being perfect and brilliant, the expression will make sense if it is interpreted as ironic,” Rahtu says.

“In a recent letter to the editor of a newspaper, the writer complained about the state of Helsinki taxis. He listed how the indicators were out of order and the speedometers did not function properly. The windscreens also seemed to have something strange happening to them since the drivers clearly could not tell the difference between the colours red, amber and green. When an openly negative letter focuses on such peculiar things as this, the reader is quickly able to deduct that the real target of complaint is hidden and to create coherence in the text by interpreting it as ironic.

Toini Rahtu: Both and – irony as coherence and incoherence. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran toimituksia. Helsinki 2006. http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/

Borat and Krisse – working for a better world?

Currently one of the most famous users of irony, satire and parody is the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in his characters Ali G and Borat. I went to see the controversial comedy hit Borat, accompanied by Sari Salin, who has studied irony in literature.

Borat is an ultra-chauvinist and racist East-European journalist on a learning trip to find out about American society. Cohen has a go at anti-Semitism, chauvinism, racism and homophobia as well as stereotypical ideas about the backward East Europeans held in the West. Nobody in the film seems to question the authenticity of Borat’s character.

Cohen uses irony in its classical sense: saying something other than what he means. He plays a prejudiced character with the aim of bringing the hidden prejudices of his victims to light.

“Cohen uses Socratic irony, pretending to be stupid, but what is more, the film reminds me of the traditional and universal trickster character. It is a mythical character who breaks every rule and is incredibly stupid, yet extremely cunning. All the picaresque and fool characters and present-day comedians originate from the trickster,” Salin says.

Why, then, do we find the rebels who break taboos and basically just mess about so funny? “Probably because they enforce social rules by breaking them. In other words, having a trickster do all the silly things, the rest of us don’t have to. The fool teaches us through laughter.”

Finnish media also has its own trickster. In the recently wound-up semi-fictional talk show Krisse Show, the host and comedian Krisse Salminen upset the stereotype of a stupid blonde through parodying it to the extreme. In the show, the Krisse character was portrayed as a naïve and self-obsessed super-bimbo.

The show attacked our ossified ideas and the power structures on which they are based by carnivalising cultural stereotypes. A blonde, who usually is reduced to being the object of a gaze and desire, took control of the situation by placing men under her own direct gaze, talk and opinions and bossing about and ridiculing her celebrity guests. Krisse also upset male stereotypes by making her male guests play with Barbie dolls.

She was also to some extent successful in questioning power structures, although true to the ironic cause, she also managed to reinforce them at the same time. There will always be viewers who miss the irony. In their view, the show probably only served to support the weird cultural construction linking hair colour, intellect and morals.

Borat employed serious topics such as racism and anti-Semitism, so it is natural that many feared that Cohen’s irony would go amiss. That Cohen operated in a real environment has also raised some questions about the ethics of comedy. Cohen admittedly makes comedy at the expense of real people, individuals who do not realise he is a comedian. Some of the people featuring in Borat have sued Cohen, because they feel that they have been betrayed and publicly humiliated.

“You cannot deny the legitimacy of Cohen’s work, but you need not agree with his methods,” Salin. “Irony is not always funny for its victim. I think Borat is hilarious, but then again I am safe, I am not the target of his dagger. That’s irony for you, it appeals to your intellect but also raises emotions. The most curious thing to me about Cohen’s comedy is that the people he interviewed never seemed to have a moment’s doubt that this completely outrageous character was not real. Does his character really meet our expectations of hip-hoppers or East Europeans?”

Toini Rahtu points out that the main thing in understanding irony is the ability to interpret text through the person’s innate codes. “But if an interviewee views Ali G through the code that believes that obviously any idiot with no self-criticism can be on TV because, let’s face it, that happens all the time, he or she may not be able to suspect him at all.”

This article is also based a Wikipedia article on irony and Mia Malmberg’s master’s thesis in the field of communications Sukupuolten representaatiot, huumori ja valta Krisse televisiosarjassa (Representations of gender, humour and power in Krisse Show).

Tapio Ollikainen

Top