Last weekend. A quiet Sunday afternoon in Eastern Europe. TPCKAM was in the kitchen making dinner, the kids and I settled down in front of the tv. Two of Two and I wanted to watched the football, One of Two wanted to watch cartoons. We negotiated a compromise. Football until half-time, then switch to Boomerang.
When we changed over, Scooby Doo was just starting. An episode about a guy dressed up as a scary monster, who never actually does anyone any harm. Can’t quite place it from that description? I know...
At one point, Fred and the gang are in a motor boat being chased across San Francisco Bay by a gang of thirty foot great white sharks, which are snapping ferociously at the boat. Something which I expect happens all the time in San Francisco Bay. After a scary chase, which has Scooby leaping into Shaggy’s arms in a comedy manner, they finally think they’ve evaded the sharks. Velma stands at the back of the boat and says, ‘Well, it looks like we’ve evaded those sharks.’ Two seconds later a gigantic shark appears and bites off the whole rear end of the boat, including the motor. Velma looks phlegmatically at the camera and quips, ‘Irony, my old friend, we meet again...’
A lovely line, well delivered. But you can spot the problem. IT’S NOT IRONY!!!!
What is the matter with these people? What she said was counting your chickens before they’ve hatched. It’s taking things for granted. It’s spending the money before the cheque’s cashed. It’s a myriad of things, but it’s just not irony.
Had they been going to swim, and someone had said, ‘no don’t swim, there are people-eating sharks, you’ll die’ and then they’d decided to take the boat instead, but rather than people-eating sharks, the sharks had turned out to be boat-eating sharks and therefore they’d been eaten, when if they’d swum they’d have been all right......that would have been irony.
Irony is a complex idea which generally defies one line description. That’s why some people in a certain country which we won’t mention just don’t get it. And yet they’re the one’s who mention irony more than anyone else. Irony, as William Shatner says in Airplane 2, can be pretty ironic sometimes.
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