The Urban Sherpa - A Definition of Irony

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The Urban Sherpa keeps a collection of stories and curios filed under Mythic Proportions.

A Definition of Irony

November 16, 2006

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
— Samuel Beckett

The Irish, claimed Freud, are "one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is no use whatsoever"—a quote that usually comes to my mind after a few shots of Jameson's, when I get that hard-to-suppress urge to punch something. Usually, I have the (relative) good sense to pick an inanimate target, at least, so that the only person I hurt is myself (which I think is why people go into psychoanalysis in the first place...).

I'd like to posit a theory, based on the evidence provided by two of Ireland's more famous—Sam Beckett and James Joyce. Clearly the Irish have a refined sense of irony. ("Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.") And for an ironic, there's no higher station than that of a sad clown. The Irish are impervious to happiness because anyone with a heightened sense of irony is in love with his own sadness. Ever the aesthete, he will go out of his way to sabotage his own life, because only then can he fully savor its irony...

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