Ironic -radosh.net/writing
Originally published in The New York Press, April 17, 1996

For those of you who don't watch MTV, the number one video for the past five weeks has been Alanis Morissette's "Ironic". That may not sound impressive, but in MTV time five weeks is a generation. Eight weeks after a song is first released, the artist is eligible for a "where are they now"segment.
"It’s like rain on your wedding day/It’s a free ride when you’ve already paid/It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take." It’s...a bummer, in other words. But is it ironic? Is there an incongruity between what is expected and what occurs? Is something revealed to the observer that remains hidden to the players, thus lending their words or actions a humor or poignancy of which they themselves are unaware? Is it something Socrates or Rod Serling might have said? No, I don’t think.
"A traffic jam when you’re already late/A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break." One begins to get the feeling that for Ms. Morissette, any unexpected situation qualifies as irony. A traffic jam when you would have been early otherwise? Man, that’s ironic. A no-smoking sign when you weren’t planning on smoking to begin with? How ironic can you get?
At its most irritating, "Ironic" relates the story of a man who has been afraid to fly his whole life, and when he finally does get on a plane, it crashes. "And isn’t it ironic?" Well, no. Ironic would be if he was so afraid to fly that he took a train and then the train crashed. But this? This is appropriate. This is the exact opposite of ironic.