Irony

In practice

Irony lives in the gap between what is said or expected and what is true. A character who calls a flooded basement "cozy" means the opposite; a fire station that burns down is the opposite of what anyone expected. The audience feels the gap, and the gap is where the meaning, the humor or the pain comes from.

Writers use irony because it makes the audience do some of the work. When a line means its opposite, the listener has to notice, and noticing feels like being let in on something. That is why irony is the natural voice of satire, of dry comedy and of characters who protect themselves by never saying what they feel.

In a screenplay, irony can sit in a line of dialogue, in a plot turn or in what the audience knows that a character does not. The three kinds work differently on screen: verbal irony needs an actor who can play both meanings, situational irony needs a setup the audience remembers, and dramatic irony needs the audience to be told the truth early.

Two kinds of irony in one scene

The fall is situational irony: the man whose job is preventing accidents causes one, under a banner celebrating the lack of them. Priya's last line is verbal irony, since a record is the opposite of what she means. The banner is planted in the first action line, so the audience is ready to feel the reversal the moment it happens.

What irony is

Irony is a literary device built on a contrast between appearance and reality: between what someone says and what they mean, between what is expected and what happens, or between what a character believes and what the audience knows. The word comes from the Greek eironeia, feigned ignorance, after a stock character in Greek comedy who pretended to know less than he did.

There are three main types. Verbal irony is saying the opposite of what you mean. Situational irony is an outcome that is the opposite of what was expected. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something a character does not. Each one has a full section below, and dramatic irony has its own page in this glossary.

Irony is not the same as coincidence or bad luck. Rain on your wedding day is unlucky, not ironic, which is the long-running joke about the song "Ironic." It would be ironic if a meteorologist planned an outdoor wedding for the one rainy day of the year after promising the guests sunshine. Irony needs an expectation, and an outcome that turns it upside down.

Verbal irony

Verbal irony is when a speaker says one thing and means the opposite, or something very different. Telling a friend who just dropped a tray of glasses "smooth move" is verbal irony. The listener understands the real meaning from context, tone and the obvious mismatch between the words and the situation.

Sarcasm is a kind of verbal irony meant to mock or wound. All sarcasm is verbal irony, but not all verbal irony is sarcastic: understatement ("it's a bit chilly" in a blizzard) and gentle teasing are ironic without being cruel. In Julius Caesar, Mark Antony repeats "Brutus is an honorable man" until the crowd hears the opposite, one of the most famous uses of verbal irony in English.

On screen, verbal irony depends on delivery. The same line can read as sincere or ironic on the page, so a screenwriter makes the irony clear through the situation around the line, as in the excerpt above, rather than through a note telling the actor to be sarcastic. If the context makes the opposite meaning obvious, any reading of the line will land.

Situational irony

Situational irony is when the outcome of a situation is the opposite of what the characters or the audience expected, often in a way that mocks the expectation. A pickpocket has his own pocket picked; a man who spends his life avoiding risk is hit by a falling satellite in his own backyard. The surprise only works if the expectation was set first.

O. Henry's story "The Gift of the Magi" is the classic example. Della sells her long hair to buy her husband a chain for his watch, and Jim sells his watch to buy her combs for her hair. Each gift is perfect and useless at once. In The Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last," a bookworm survives the end of the world, finally has all the time he wants to read, and breaks his glasses.

Cosmic irony, or the irony of fate, is situational irony on a grand scale, when the universe itself seems to toy with a character. Thomas Hardy's novels are full of it. A writer has to handle it carefully: if the outcome feels arbitrary, the audience reads it as the writer's cruelty rather than the story's meaning, so the reversal should grow out of the character's own choices.

Dramatic irony, and how to write irony

Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something a character does not. In Romeo and Juliet, the audience knows Juliet is only drugged when Romeo finds her and believes she is dead. In a thriller, the audience sees the bomb under the table while the characters chat. It turns ordinary scenes into suspense, and it is covered in depth on the dramatic irony page.

To write situational irony, plant the expectation clearly and early, then pay it off with its opposite. The banner in the excerpt, the safety rules, the character's boast that nothing can go wrong: each one is a setup. The tighter the link between the expectation and the reversal, the more the irony feels like meaning rather than chance.

To write verbal irony, give the character a reason to say the opposite of what they mean: embarrassment, anger, wit or self-protection. A character who is always ironic can become tiring, so let them drop it once, at the moment that matters most. A sincere line from a character who never speaks sincerely is one of the most powerful beats a writer has.