IRONY IN ALANIS MORRISETTE

There are many music artists that use irony in their writing. Alanis Morrisette focuses on irony in her song “Ironic“. Alanis Morrisette is very popular in the United States. “ Ironic” is one of her more popular songs. The song includes many examples of irony, although some of the examples are not actually ironic. Thus, making the title of the song “Ironic” very ironic because the song is not entirely ironic.
An excellent example of irony in the song “Ironic” would be , “It’s a death row pardon two minutes too late”. This would be ironic because someone that was about to be let off death row but he dies two minutes before. The person was going to be given their life when in fact their life was actually taken from them. Another example of irony would be, “It’s a black fly on your Chardonnay”. This is a clear example of irony because Chardonnay is a very classy drink. A black fly is very gross and dirty. High class chardonnay and a dirty fly are very opposite and represent two totally different things. Its ironic also because when someone has a classy drink one would never expect to have a dirty fly around it.
On the other hand, some of the lines in the song are not ironic at all. One can see how Alanis thought they would be ironic when they are just unfortunate coincidences. An example of this would be, “It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take”. This is not ironic because the person knew it was good advice but chose not to take it anyway. They knew what the advice was and they chose not to take it. Therefore, it is not ironic because it was their own fault that they did not take it. Some of the examples in the song are definitely not ironic . One example of these would be, “A traffic jam when your already late”. It would not be ironic at all to come to a traffic jam if one is already running late. They are already running late so it does not matter if they are more late or not. They already expected to be late anyways. It would be ironic if someone left their house earlier than usual to be on time but got caught in a traffic jam and ended up being late anyways.

Alyssa Poirier