well-dressed foolish ideas

On Saturday I went with a couple folks to Haagen Dazs - yes, they put a store in the middle of the tourist district in Vienna. How cruel, right? So we were eating our various ice creams, sorbets and drinking coffee discussing the finer points of the distinctions between irony, cynicism and sarcasm. I have this kind of mental block. I know it goes against all understanding that other people hold. I know this. I can't make it stop. I just don't associate irony with any form of humor, sense of humor or joke. Not in the way I can associate cynicism and sarcasm. I tried. I failed.

I think I could blame my catholic school education, and although it's likely responsible for a lot of my mental blocks, I don't think that's really a sufficient excuse that I cannot understand why some people would say that they make ironic jokes or that old, "I was being ironic." comment that I just can't grasp.

Isn't irony all about situations and scenarios, not jokes?

Main Entry: iro·ny
Pronunciation: 'I-r&-nE also 'I(-&)r-nE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -nies
Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eirOnia, from eirOn dissembler
1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning -- called also Socratic irony
2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play -- called also dramatic irony, tragic irony

Blame www.m-w.com for that. See, I always thought of irony as the "a" of the third entry in that definition. Maybe I'm just mad.

This is a likely explanation.

Not that anyone needs to know this about me, but I find days of the week underwear endlessly amusing. Especially the kind that quote Cure lyrics.

Another topic of discussion at the ice cream shop was about a girl that someone we all knew took home the previous night. He likened the gaggle of girls that started following this guy around at the beginning of the night to the 3 horsemen of the apocalypse. I recognize that the story involves four of them, however, there were only 3 girls, and apparently no need to represent death. Because I thought it was amusing, I'll share a summary of the story as it was told to me.

"So *this guy* met the three horsemen of the apocalypse. Famine fucked off early, at about 4 in the morning, which left War and Pestilence battling it out for his attention. After a while, Pestilence got tired of it and fucked off to find a guy closer to her own age - about a decade younger. So *this guy* ended up with War."

Make love not war, I say.