L’'''ironie''' est une forme d’expression qui consiste à dire l’inverse de ce que l’on pense, tout en s'efforçant de laisser entendre la distance qui existe entre ce que l’on dit et ce que l’on pense réellement.

En littérature, l’ironie est l’art de se moquer de quelqu’un ou de quelque chose en vue de faire réagir un lecteur, un auditeur ou un interlocuteur. Elle est en outre utilisée dans l’objectif de dénoncer, de critiquer quelque chose ou quelqu’un. Pour cela, le locuteur décrit souvent la réalité avec des termes apparemment valorisants, dans le but de la dévaloriser. L’ironie invite donc le lecteur ou l’auditeur, à être actif pendant sa lecture ou son audition, à réfléchir et à choisir une position.

Voici un bon exemple :

Un garçon dit à sa meilleure amie qui le néglige : "je suppose que nous sommes amis ?". Disant cela, il va la faire réagir et ainsi lui faire comprendre sa position.

== Étymologie ==

L’étymologie du mot ''iron'' provient du grec ''εἰρωνεία'' (''eironeia''), qui signifie ''ignorance feinte'' (une technique souvent employée par le philosophe Grec indo-européenne ''*wer- ''''dire'' .

==Caractéristiques==

L’ironie verbale est ainsi souvent employée dans des textes et discours argumentatifs et critiques. L’auteur utilise alors différents procédés de style :  
* l’antiphrase : dire le contraire de ce que l’on pense, en le montrant d’une manière évidente. (ex : « Ah ! ''Tu es propre !'' Regarde toutes ces taches ! »)
* l’hyperbole : exagérer ses propos. (ex : « Il est grand, gigantesque. »)
* la litote : dire peu pour suggérer beaucoup, fausse atténuation. (« Va, je ne te hais point » = je t’aime)
* la parodie : imitation pour se moquer.
* le pastiche : imitation d’une personne, d’un style, d’une profession, etc. pour se moquer.
L’ironie se caractérise aussi par la typographie, la ponctuation (points d’exclamation récurrents, questions rhétoriques, points de suspension, parenthèses, guillemets...), l’intonation... Un signe typographique, le point d'ironie, existe pour indiquer que la phrase qui précède est ironique, mais n’a jamais été vraiment utilisé.

Quelques genres littéraires où l’ironie est omniprésente :
*le conte philosophique (ex : Voltaire)
*le Montesquieu)
*la Bossuet)
*le pamphlet (ex : Voltaire)
*la critique littéraire
*l’article, l’article de presse (ex : Diderot)
*le billet d’humeur.
*l’essai (ex : Montaigne)
*la La Fontaine)
*le dialogue, le monologue (théâtre) (ex : Molière)
*l’Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Sainte-Beuve)

== Ironie socratique ==

160px|right|thumb|Portrait de [[Socrate]]
L’ironie socratique consiste, pour le philosophe, à feindre l’ignorance afin d’exposer la faiblesse de la position d’une autre personne et lui en faire prendre conscience.

'''Irony''' is a literary or incongruity or discordance between what a speaker or writer says and what he or she means, or what is generally understood.

In modern usage it can also refer to particularly striking examples of incongruities observed in everyday life between what was intended or said and what actually happened.

There is some argument about what is or is not ironic, but all the different senses of irony revolve around the perceived notion of an incongruity between what is said and what is meant; or between an understanding of reality, or an expectation of a reality, and what actually happens.

Irony can be humorous, but it does not have to be.

The term Socratic irony, which was coined by Aristotle, refers to the Socratic Method.  It is not irony in the modern sense of the word<ref>[http://www.sarcasmsociety.com/irony/socratic.php Sarcasm Society: Socratic Irony]</ref>.

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thumb|300px|A "[[smoking ban|no smoking" notice adorns the Sherlock Holmes tiles in Baker Street tube station, a prime example of situational irony.]] 

==Types of irony==
Most modern theories of rhetoric distinguish between three types of irony: verbal, dramatic and situational.
*''Verbal irony'' is a disparity of expression and intention: when a speaker says one thing but means another, or when a literal meaning is contrary to its intended effect. An example of this is sarcasm.
*''Dramatic'' (or tragic) ''irony'' is a disparity of expression and awareness: when words and actions possess a significance that the listener or audience understands, but the speaker or character does not.
*''Situational irony'' is the disparity of intention and result: when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect. Likewise, ''cosmic irony'' is disparity between human desires and the harsh realities of the outside world (or the whims of the gods).  By some older definitions, situational irony and cosmic irony are not irony at all.

===Verbal irony, including sarcasm===
Verbal irony is distinguished from situational irony and dramatic irony in that it is produced ''intentionally'' by speakers. For instance, if a speaker exclaims, “I’m not upset!” but reveals an upset emotional state through her voice while truly trying to claim she's not upset, it would not be verbal irony just by virtue of its verbal manifestation (it would, however, be situational irony). But if the same speaker said the same words and intended to communicate that she was upset by claiming she was not, the utterance would be verbal irony. This distinction gets at an important aspect of verbal irony: speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves. There are examples of verbal irony that do not rely on saying the opposite of what one means, and there are cases where all the traditional criteria of irony exist and the utterance is not ironic. 

Ironic similes are a form of verbal irony where a speaker does intend to communicate the opposite of what they mean. For instance, the following explicit similes have the form of a statement that means ''P(X)'' but which conveys the meaning ''not P'':

* as funny as cancer
* as clear as mud
* as pleasant as a root-canal

The irony is recognizable in each case only by using stereotypical knowledge of the source concepts (e.g., mud, root-canals) to detect an incongruity.

A fair amount of confusion has surrounded the issue regarding the relationship between verbal irony and sarcasm, and psychology researchers have addressed the issue directly (e.g, Lee & Katz, 1998). For example, ridicule is an important aspect of sarcasm, but not verbal irony in general. By this account, sarcasm is a particular kind of personal criticism leveled against a person or group of persons that incorporates verbal irony. For example, a person reports to her friend that rather than going to a medical doctor to treat her ovarian cancer, she has decided to see a spiritual healer instead. In response her friend says sarcastically, "Great idea! I hear they do fine work!" The friend could have also replied with any number of ironic expressions that should not be labeled as sarcasm exactly, but still have many shared elements with sarcasm.

Research shows that most instances of verbal irony are considered to be sarcastic, suggesting that the term ''sarcasm'' is more widely used than its technical definition suggests it should be (Bryant & Fox Tree, 2002; Gibbs, 2000). Some psycholinguistic theorists suggest that sarcasm ("Great idea!", "I hear they do fine work."), hyperbole ("That's the best idea I have heard in years!"), understatement ("Sure, what the hell, it's only cancer..."), rhetorical questions ("What, does your spirit have cancer?"), double entendre ("I'll bet if you do that, you'll be communing with spirits in no time...") and jocularity ("Get them to fix your bad back while you're at it.") should all be considered forms of verbal irony (Gibbs, 2000). The differences between these tropes can be quite subtle, and relate to typical emotional reactions of listeners, and the rhetorical goals of the speakers. Regardless of the various ways folk taxonomies categorize figurative language types, people in conversation are attempting to decode speaker intentions and discourse goals, and are not generally identifying, by name, the kinds of tropes used.

===Tragic irony===
Tragic irony can only take place in a fictional context.  In this form of irony, the words and actions of the characters belie<!-- Please do not modify yet another time: "belie" is correct, it is not "believe"--> the real situation, which the spectators fully realize.

Tragic irony particularly characterized the drama of ancient Greece, owing to the familiarity of the spectators with the legends on which so many of the plays were based. Sophocles' ''Oedipus the King'' provides a classic example of tragic irony at its fullest and finest.

Irony threatens authoritative models of discourse by "removing the semantic security of ‘one signifier : one signified’";<ref>Hutcheon, p. 13</ref> irony has some of its foundation in the onlooker’s perception of paradox which arises from insoluble problems.

For example:
* In the William Shakespeare play, ''Romeo and Juliet'', when Romeo finds Juliet in a drugged death-like sleep, he assumes her to be dead and kills himself. Upon awakening to find her dead lover beside her, Juliet kills herself with his knife. 
* In O. Henry's story ''The Gift of the Magi'', a young couple are too poor to buy each other Christmas gifts. The man finally pawns his heirloom pocket watch to buy his wife a set of combs for her long, beautiful, prized hair. She, meanwhile, cuts off her treasured hair to sell it to a wig-maker for money to buy her husband a watch-chain.

===Dramatic irony===
In drama, the device of giving the spectator an item of information that at least one of the characters in the narrative is unaware of (at least consciously), thus of placing the spectator a step ahead of at least one of the characters. Dramatic irony involves three stages: installation, exploitation and resolution.

For example:
* In ''City Lights'', we know that Charlie Chaplin's character is not a millionaire, but the blind flower girl (Virginia Cherill) does not. 
* In ''Cyrano de Bergerac'', we know that Cyrano loves Roxane and that he is the real author of the letters that Christian is writing to the young woman; Roxane is unaware of this.
* In ''North by Northwest'', we know that Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is not Kaplan; Vandamm (James Mason) and his acolytes do not. We also know that Kaplan is a fictitious agent invented by the CIA; Roger and Vandamm do not. 
* In ''Oedipus the King'', we know that Oedipus himself is the murderer that he is seeking; Oedipus, Creon and Jocasta do not. 
* In ''Othello'', we know that Desdemona has been faithful to Othello, but he doesn't. We also know that Iago is pulling the strings, a fact hidden from Othello, Desdemona, Cassio and Roderigo. 
* In ''Pygmalion'', we know that Eliza is a woman of the street; Higgins's family does not.
* In ''Titanic'', we know that the ocean liner is going to hit an iceberg and sink, but the passengers and crew cannot know this.
* In ''Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith'', we know that Anakin Skywalker will become Darth Vader and that Palpatine is Darth Sidious, but the Jedi do not.

===Situational irony===
thumb|200px|right|''[[The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' is a story whose plot revolves around irony. Dorothy travels to a wizard and fulfills his challenging demands to go home, before discovering she had the ability to go back home all the time. The Scarecrow longs for intelligence, only to discover he is already a genius, and the Tin Woodsman longs to be capable of love, only to discover he already has a heart. The Lion, who at first appears to be  a whimpering coward turns out to be bold and fearless, The people in Emerald City believe the Wizard to be a powerful deity, only to discover he is a bumbling eccentric old man. ]]

Definition: irony of a situation is a discrepancy between the expected result and actual results when enlivened by 'perverse appropriateness'.  This is a relatively modern use of the term -- see "Usage Controversy", below.

For example:
*When assassinate President Ronald Reagan, all of his shots initially missed the President; however a bullet ricocheted off the bullet-proof windows of the Presidential limousine and struck Reagan in the chest. Thus, the windows made to protect the President from gunfire were partially responsible for his being shot. 
*Monty Python's last comedy album ''The Hastily Cobbled Together for a Fast Buck Album'' was continuously delayed from release for various reasons, having yet to see an official release, and has since been made available online for free by the group, thus making the album neither hasty nor earning the group a single buck.
*If someone were to go on a trip and decide not to take a plane because they are worried about crashing, and take a bus instead, it would be ironic if a plane hit the bus they took, thereby realizing their fears of crashing with a plane, despite measures taken at the outset of the journey to avoid such a fate.

====Irony of fate (cosmic irony)====
The expression “irony of fate” stems from the notion that the gods (or the Fates) are amusing themselves by toying with the minds of mortals, with deliberate ironic intent. Closely connected with situational irony, it arises from sharp contrasts between reality and human ideals, or between human intentions and actual results.

For example:
*In 1974 the Consumer Product Safety Commission had to recall 80,000 of its own lapel buttons promoting "toy safety", because the buttons had sharp edges, used lead paint, and had small clips that could be broken off and subsequently swallowed. <ref>''New York Times'', December 3, 2007, Page B1: It Dawned on Adults After WW II: 'You'll Shoot Your Eye Out!</ref>
*Importing Cane Toads to Australia to protect the environment only to create worse environmental problems for Australia.
*heart attack (a death associated with sedentary, unhealthy lifestyles) while out jogging.
*In the Kalgoorlie (Australia) gold rush of the 1890s, large amounts of the little-known mineral calaverite (gold telluride) were identified as fool's gold, and were discarded. The mineral deposits were used as a building material, and for the filling of potholes and ruts. (Several years later, the nature of the mineral was identified, leading to a minor gold rush to excavate the streets).

====Historical irony (cosmic irony through time)====
When history is seen through modern eyes, it sometimes happens that there is an especially sharp contrast between the way historical figures see their world and the probable future of their world, and what actually transpired. What we now refer to as "World War I" was originally called "The War to End All Wars"; this is an example of historical irony. Historical irony is therefore a subset of cosmic irony, but one in which the element of time is bound up.

For example:
*"They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." Nearly the last words of American Civil War General John Sedgwick before being shot through the eye by a Confederate sniper.<ref>http://www.civilwarinteractive.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=294&forum_id=1</ref>

*In Dallas, in response to Mrs. Connally's comment, "Mr. President, you can't say that Dallas doesn't love you," John F. Kennedy said, "That's very obvious." He was assassinated immediately afterwards.<ref>[http://www.diplom.org/manus/Presidents/faq/last.html Dead Presidents: Causes of Death<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref>

Examples of irony in history:
*Alfred Nobel invented the relatively stable explosive dynamite to essentially prevent deaths (such as in mining work which relied on the unstable explosives gunpowder and nitroglycerin) but his invention was soon taken up as a weapon in the Franco-Prussian War, among others, causing many deaths.
*The Nazi Soviet Pact was signed on the same day of the year as the start of the Battle of Stalingrad.
*Prior to the First World War, Adolf Hitler did have a good friend who was Jewish.
*Fritz Haber was the patriotic German Jewish creator of Zyklon B as a pesticide, which was later used in the Holocaust.

==Irony in use==
===Ironic art===
One point of view has it that all modern art is ironic because the viewer cannot help but compare it to previous works.  For example, any portrait of a standing, non-smiling woman will naturally be compared with the Mona Lisa; the tension of meaning exists, whether the artist meant it or not.  