Any active agent who appears unexpectedly to solve an insoluble difficulty.

 

 

The concept of irony was first introduced to me by a high school English teacher in a way that baffled me. She described irony as "reality differing from the masked appearance."

Neither I nor a single one of my fellow 9th grade classmates knew what our teacher was talking about. Her definition sounded, at best, like Bible verse — parables, maybe. A feeling of inferiority and intellectual incompetence passed among us as she repeated her definition of "irony" many, many times.

Smiling a Cheshire grin her voice steadily decreased in volume until she was barely whispering the phrase "Reality differing from the masked appearance." She spoke through squinting eyes, through a seemingly knowing smile, through something like wisdom, through something that made the definition of "irony" impossible for us to decipher.

I would come to understand irony later that year, not at school (like so many things) but in a conversation with friends regarding the final episode of the television show "M*A*S*H". In that episode the Korean War ends and the American M*A*S*H personnel go home — except for Sergeant Klinger. Klinger ended up staying having met and fallen in love with a local Korean woman.

"That," a friend of mine declared, "is irony!"

I noticed my friend’s understanding of that word because I was still puzzled by my English teacher’s "reality differing from the masked appearance" obscurity. Klinger staying in Korea is ironic because throughout the run of M*A*S*H his character made elaborate efforts to get kicked out of the service with a Section 8 discharge. Klinger, of all people, would have been the first one to get out of Korea when the opportunity presented itself, but it was he who ended up staying behind.

Irony!

My 9th grade English teacher’s definition of irony has come to make a little bit of sense to me over time, but not much. It may be that its obtuseness is symptomatic of a general misunderstanding of irony, or for that matter a genuine discrepancy of the concept.