There's a trope of people going around correcting others with "That isn't what irony means, btw." Maybe I don't know what irony means myself, even after having helped hundreds of students one-on-one with (among many other things) the meaning of irony, including worksheets on different types of irony. (I'm not being sarcastic. None of that makes me an expert, and I'm not.) But imho, people who I hear saying "That isn't what irony means, btw," ironically have peculiarly restrictive personal definitions of irony that match neither the dictionary nor standard use in English classes. It's an easy way to feel clever, casually implying that others are being stupid. I'm doing it myself right now. But I didn't start it this time.

Irony, as far as I understand it, is roughly identical to paradox. Anything that seems paradoxical or contradictory is a candidate for description or comedic application as irony. If you expect one thing and approximately the opposite thing happens, that's irony. If one thing seems true and you go around correcting people, but you are the one who should be corrected, that's irony.

This all started, I think, when the public took to bashing Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic." For example, here's a quick analysis: https://copyblogger.com/did-alanis-morissette-get-irony-right/

Personally, I think some of the situations described are ironic. They aren't ironic enough to be funny. They betray a sense of entitlement, or at least of naivete or optimism. If you are Pollyanna, life will constantly thwart your expectations. But, as Morissette points out, life will also thwart your expectations if you insist on visions of doom and gloom. If you believe the old pun that "God is an iron," then some of the irony of this world, which you might or might not call "cosmic irony," seems to work almost homeostatically. No matter how bad things look, ironically, the very fact they feel so bad is an indication that you'll be seeing some sunshine. Yes, that is perhaps the gambler's fallacy, but it's most people's lived experience: "It's always darkest before dawn." Though things also go from bad to worse, or from good to great, we can be forgiven for thinking that "God only challenges us with what we are able to handle." Even a pessimistic atheist has to admit life often seems contradictory or untenable yet somehow covered in boxing gloves at the last instant. (I'm naturally a pessimist, verging on optimism via corrective action, and an agnostic atheist. So I speak from experience.)

I would argue that "Ironic" is a song about perceived irony, about life expectations, a song whose examples are not effective irony from a comedy standpoint. Life defies our expectations. That's the irony in the title. And, yes, that isn't spectacularly ironic. "Expect the unexpected," right? But personally, I fail to see that irony is utterly missing from the song (that's just too easy to say for commentators to resist, imho), and I don't say this because I'm an Alanis Morissette fan, or because I was ever particularly aware of the lyrics or attached to any interpretation of them.

The song doesn't 100% lack irony. It's naive... and also perceptive. But it isn't going to make you laugh.

Let's say you've got a scene from a film in which a person walks around all day craving a cigarette, asking people, getting turned down, arriving at stores just before they close, losing the pack they finally managed to buy, having a whole box of matches fail, etc. (The smoker's version of The Discrete Charm of the Bourgoisie, if you will.) Finally, they sit down on a bench by a store front, take a deep breath, and light a cigarette with a ridiculous lighter they'd never ordinarily care to be seen using. The camera pulls back and you see a "No Smoking" sign to their left (our right), and as it pulls back further, you see a police officer casually walking into the frame with a billy club, not yet seeing the smoker.

I consider that ironic. Would it make me laugh? Maybe not. I'm not sure. But there's irony in it. The only difference between this and similar setups in the song is the amount of buildup and misdirection.

When you're late and you get on the road only to find a traffic jam, that isn't particularly ironic because you have no very good reason to expect there NOT to be a traffic jam. There isn't any buildup. But it's still the opposite of what you were hoping for, and if you usually leave on time and usually encounter no significant traffic, then this double misfortune is the beginning of irony. (To use a cartomancy metaphor, it's the ace of irony, or maybe the two of irony, not the ten of irony, or the queen, or king, or whatever.) The traffic could have happened any other time. It's a little ironic that it happened the rare day you happened to be running late. In itself, it isn't particularly ironic; you'd need to have a naive outlook for this to seem especially surprising or contradictory. There's no inherent contradiction, exactly. It's a coincidence. But irony can be coincidental. For all that we know, despite our excess of scientific accumulation (far more than any one person can ever hope to profit from), it seems the nature of reality is (often, but not to a t) to do what we don't expect, almost as if it knew what we expected, and worked to subvert that. If there were a God who loved us all, you'd think that, say, when you're running late and praying for clear roads, there would be less traffic, rather than more. Yet few sane people would claim that the traffic occurs as a punishment for past transgressions; it's just incidental. So is there a sentience behind all this, or not?

These things are only truly ironic if you expect plans to go as planned, which you shouldn't. But then why would you plan? Because plans won't go as planned. It's a little... contradictory. It's a bit of a paradox, from a certain angle. But there you go.

It seems likely enough that Alanis Morissette wrote a song on the theme of irony but failed to make her case. Or maybe she said, "isn't it ironic?" once and someone said, "That isn't what irony means, btw," and she disagreed, and decided to crowd-source opinions about this with a hit song.

Or maybe she *did* write a song with a bunch of irony near-misses and called it "Ironic" in full conscience.

I'm not really invested in any of these considerations, except I don't think "irony" is some specialist term that clever people should make others feel stupid about for not using in an approved clever way.