I don't know if there's any type of tension that's more fun for an audience than dramatic irony. Dramatic irony occurs when your audience knows something that some or all of the characters in a film ...

From William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “The Book of Mormon,” the power of irony transcends genres and ...

Local columnist Raymond Atkins explains irony as the gap between expectation and reality, outlining verbal, situational, and dramatic forms, and argues that recognizing irony fosters humility and awar ...

On September 18, 2001, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, declared, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.” He was trashed for the sentiment. Only a month after the event, Michiko Kakutani ...

When writing a script, the situations you put your characters in are key. These moments are what ultimately provide insight into who they are, while also moving the story forward. There are many ways ...

Like simile, metaphor, personification and hyperbole, irony is a very useful figure of speech. Writers and other creative workers regularly make use of it, including comedians. It can, however, also ...

A recent hipster-hating New York Times column got this pop-cultural moment exactly backwards. Cultural critics love hypothesizing about hipsters. And certainly hipsters make for useful lab rats if you ...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts One of my pet hates is when ...

Well, isn’t this ironic? Just when we need an ironic sensibility to remain cleareyed in dangerous times, we’re told irony is obsolete. And this from some people who’ve made it their business to peddle ...