"Isn't it Ironic? Don'tcha think?"

Irony is my armour. Irony is the essential component in my approach to the world. Without it I would be lost, confused and angry. Irony gives us the detachment we need to consider the people and events that shape our daily lives beyond our preliminary emotional reaction. It allows us to sustain antithetical ideas. It is the enemy of ideology. Irony will free your mind from dogma and allow you to become that most rare and valuable of things, an original thinker.

This is not to say that we should recoil from the sincere, but perhaps we should be wary. With few exceptions, I suspect that most of the evil we've unleashed upon the world has been done so with the utmost sincerity. A sincere idea is only valuable if it is a good one and a good idea can survive ironic scrutiny. Quality and originality generally look after themselves.

 I'm, also, not advocating snark, sarcasm or cynicism. These are not intellectual processes but attitudes. Snark is derisive and dismissive with no thought to context. A cynic, in the words of Oscar Wilde, knows "the price of everything and the value of nothing". Sarcasm (unless you're John Cleese) is just lazy and mean spirited, if occasionally pretty funny.

With no sense of irony, whole worlds of art and entertainment are closed to you. How can anyone appreciate Hamlet without understanding the character's endless and complicated ironies. Humour, the thing I most admire in my species, is one dimensional if we can't take delight in the spectacle of people behaving badly, and how can you laugh off bad behaviour if you have no sense of the ironic?

My favourite book is James Joyce's ULYSSES, a work of, amongst other things, the most profound irony. A day in the life of the most ordinary of men elevated to the epic level of gods and heroes. What an elegant literary irony and how moving and sincere the effect.

My favourite film is Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH, on the surface a tough hard boiled adventure, utterly devoid of irony. Look closer, apart from the fact that he makes us care about a crew of callous murderers who can't even live up to there own codes of conduct, these men achieve redemption, even transcendence through an explosion of onscreen bloodshed that shocked the world and changed cinema forever. Don't tell me Sam Peckinpah wasn't an ironist (is that even a word? Never mind I like it).

One last thing before I cease this pretentious rant. Irony has nothing to do with rain on your wedding day.
Here endeth the lesson.