Adapted from "Irony and Sarcasm" by Roger Kreuz (MIT Press, 2020). Reprinted with permission from MIT Press. In February 1996, Alanis Morissette released the fourth single from “Jagged Little Pill,” ...

Irony is one of those things you kind of know when you see or hear it on screen, but it's much harder to define and put into layman's terms. But don't worry, we have you covered there. Today, we're ...

Alanis Morissette was about as big as any artist has ever been in the ’90s. Her cutting lyricism earned her many ears, thanks to the era’s affinity for punchy realism. She released one of her ...

My first attempts at sarcasm were clumsy and too frequent. As my humor got darker and sharper, the barriers of entry into the grown-up world lowered—it was a rite of passage. Sarcasm filed and defined ...

Hypocrisy means contradicting ourselves, being inconsistent, and talking out of both sides of our mouths. But that’s also what irony means. What then distinguishes hypocrisy from irony? A hypocrite ...

Everyone knows that Americans don't understand irony. Soon after moving to England from the U.S., I discovered that my country was universally assumed to be an irony-free zone. I was at a dinner party ...