Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
An example of situational irony: despite the sign above reading "welcome," the sign below threatens unauthorized parking in the area with towing.. Irony, in its broadest sense, is the juxtaposition of what appears to be the case on the surface and what is actually the case or to be expected.
Image credits: CoralReefFish Though many people find irony amusing, quite a few might find it perplexing, too. In a piece for The MIT Press Reader, experimental psychologist, Professor of ...
Repetition is the essential comedic device and is often used in combination with other devices to reinforce them. The "callback" in comedy writing—in which a statement or theme is recalled as the punchline or close of a scene—is a classic example of the tension and release that are possible using repetition. It is also the basis for ...
A prominent feature of satire is strong irony or sarcasm—"in satire, irony is militant", according to literary critic Northrop Frye— [2] but parody, burlesque, exaggeration, [3] juxtaposition, comparison, analogy, and double entendre are all frequently used in satirical speech and writing. This "militant" irony or sarcasm often professes to ...
In this video, Stevens considers the difference between the typically cited "situational" irony, versus "dramatic" irony. According to him, the irony of the song may not necessarily be in the situations themselves, but rather in the dramatic irony – when someone is unaware of the significance of the event while others are: the situations aren ...
For example, in Saki's "The Interlopers", two men engaged in a generational feud become trapped beneath a fallen tree in a storm: "Ulrich von Gradwitz found himself stretched on the ground, one arm numb beneath him and the other held almost as helplessly in a tight tangle of forked branches, while both legs were pinned beneath the fallen mass ...
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
Irony functions as a presence in the text – the overriding context of the surrounding words that make up the poem. Only sentences such as 2 + 2 = 4 are free from irony; most other statements are prey to their immediate context and are altered by it (take, as an example, the following joke. "A woman walks into a bar and asks for a double ...