Ironies

Alanis Morrissette´s – Ironic
1. Read and listen to Alanis Morrissette´s song Ironic. Identify as many ironies as you can and classify them. Are they verbal, situational, dramatic or understatements?
Verbal:
Situational:
- It's like rain on your wedding day.
- It's a free ride when you've already paid
- A traffic jam when you're already late.
- It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife
- A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break
Dramatic:
-An old man turned ninety-eight. He won the lottery and died the next day
- Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly. (…) He waited his whole damn life to take that flight. And as the plane crashed down he thought. Well, isn't this nice
- It's meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife
Understatements:
- Isn't it ironic... don't you think?
- A little too ironic... and yeah I really do think...

2. Which do you think is the most ironic of them all? Why?
- From my point of view the most ironic phrase is the one that says “An old man turned ninety-eight. He won the lottery and died the next day”, because besides that the man wins the lottery when he is 98 years old, he dies the following day and he can’t enjoy the big amount of money he have just won.

3. What do you think is the significance of all these ironies in this song? Do you think the songwriter is...
a) trying to show humor?
b) Showing anger or fierce criticism?
c) Showing how sad some situations are?
Justify your choice and explain why you think someone would write a song like this.
- In my opinion the writer is showing how sad some situations are but also how unfair life can sometimes be. In addition, I think she’s trying to show that some things are in vane, such as the fragment that says “A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break” or “It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife”. Perhaps she wrote this song because she had passed through an ironic situation similar to one of these ones.