Planet Funny by Ken Jennings

Author:Ken Jennings
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scribner

You Oughta Know

In drama, the canonical example of irony is a character being unaware of something the audience already knows. Just as with verbal irony, the literal words of the text conceal a metamessage of precisely opposite meaning to the careful listener. Dramatic irony dates back to Greek tragedies like Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, in which Oedipus spends the first scenes of the play in pursuit of the man who murdered King Laius and thus cursed the city of Thebes. The audience knows that Oedipus himself is the unwitting killer (and has married his own mother to boot!), which gives us a little thrill of superiority during all of his tirades. We’re a step ahead. Shakespeare used the device so often you’d think he was getting paid by the dramatic irony: Othello praising the loyalty of Iago, Duncan praising the integrity of Macbeth. (Spoilers: both are bad hiring decisions.) In those cases, dramatic irony emphasizes the contrast between well-meaning men and the tragic doom that awaits them. But sometimes it’s nothing more than a smart way for an author to put readers through the wringer, as when Romeo plans to kill himself with poison alongside Juliet’s body in her tomb, though the audience knows she’s not dead, merely asleep. Hitchcock told François Truffaut that this was the difference between surprise and suspense: if a bomb is planted under a table where two people are talking, a director might be tempted to withhold that information until the last moment, but in fact it’s best to show the bomb to the audience as soon as possible. “In these conditions,” he explained, “the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!’ ” This is why, in his film Vertigo, one of the all-time-great twist endings in movie history is revealed to viewers via flashback almost an hour before the end of the film.

If we move dramatic irony into real life—that is, we assume all the world’s a stage, with an enthralled audience out somewhere in the darkness and a puckish Hitchcockian god pulling the strings—we get cosmic irony. Adolph Coors III was allergic to beer. Fitness guru Jim Fixx died of a heart attack while out for a jog. In our more enlightened age, when we assume quirks of fate like these to be part of the naturally occurring order of the universe, we prefer the less grandiose term “situational irony.” Instead of Oedipus wailing to the gods about the plague of Thebes, it’s a man complaining to coworkers about the smell in the break room fridge, only to find that his own forgotten sandwich is to blame. At long last, we’re getting close to what my ninth-grade teacher meant when he said irony was “the opposite of what you expect.” What he didn’t explain was that not

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