'Isn't it ironic?' “Um, not really.” Alanis…

‘Isn’t it ironic?’ “Um, not really.” Alanis Morissette’s classic 1995 song, “Ironic,” has been widely used as a teaching tool for Irony, much to the dismay of many English teachers and irony purists who criticize (quite ironically) that a number of the examples in the song are not actually ironic—they are instead just coincidences or bad luck. As comedian George Carlin states in his book, Brain Droppings: Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence. If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. Irony is ‘a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result.’ For instance: if a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by