The prevailing notion is that the Alanis Morissette's song “Ironic” is not ironic at all, but instead simply full of bummers, is a pedantic and sad case of unimaginative people wielding sexist bias to dismiss Alanis as dumb. Alanis has admitted that the lyrics to “Ironic” prove she didn’t properly grasp the meaning of the word. We’re not here to rehash verdicts already rendered. She f**ked it up and said so. We’re here to examine the implications of that f**kup, to explain why it was usefully so very on the nose for the '90s and to argue that the song is redeemable while the critique of it is not.

Alanis is far from dumb.

The commonly understood definition of irony, where what is said is literally the opposite of what is meant, comes to us from Greek philosophers. This is verbal irony, or in '90s parlance, sarcasm. It’s saying, “Oh, yay, I get to flunk another math test this week,” when what you mean is that you are freaked out about your consistently terrible grades in math class. Situational irony is when what happens is the opposite of what is expected to happen. It’s when you somehow get an A on that math test despite being utterly unprepared for it. Sometimes, the math teacher acknowledges situational irony by asking you to stay after class so he can accuse you of cheating, since neither of you can believe you suddenly aced a test by any other method.

By the measure of the Greeks, the song “Ironic” is a technical failure because it serves bummers in lieu of true opposites. Yet Alanis is far from dumb, and a case-by-case nitpicking of the lines is as micro as Socrates playing devil’s advocate in response to every little thing his students say, while the song is operating at a macro or meta level more akin to Aristotle’s notion of infinite regress. The fable goes that someone asks what holds up the earth in space and is told the planet rests on the back of a giant turtle. So, the question then is what that giant turtle rests on, and the answer of course is another giant turtle. It’s turtles all the way down into the abyss. Alanis is interested in these mystic “slippery slope” moments, these big-ticket human crises that feel apocalyptic yet idiotic. She didn’t spend any time checking whether the chardonnay or Mr. Play It Safe were properly aligned with the rules of irony. No admiration from Socrates then, but perhaps plenty from Aristotle.

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We don’t know whether Alanis read or cared about the Greeks, but she’s made hundreds of mentions of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung and how his pioneering theories of analytical psychology deeply influence her songwriting. Jung died in the early '60s before irony began trending as a fundamental human relation. Although he had no explicit definition of irony, he theorized that humans are strongly influenced by symbols expressed through myths and dreams or other cultural touchstones. In his emphasis on the gap between our surface words or actions and their deeper psychological meanings or feelings, Jung would probably say that irony questions and subverts normative cultural narratives. He would understand irony as an archetype drawn from our collective unconscious.

This is the way in to grasping how Alanis does effectively utilize irony. She has a deep understanding of and a postmodern comfort with cognitive dissonance, with lyrics that describe the affective landscape of the gap between our gestures and expectations. Sadly, one of the best defenses of “Ironic” comes to us from Vince Vaughn. The opening sequence of the 2013 film "The Internship," which Vaughn wrote and starred in, has “Ironic” blasting in a convertible with the top down as Vaughn and Owen Wilson head out for a night on the town. Wilson is dismayed that this song is on Vaughn’s “get psyched” playlist and they debate it. “I defy you to crush this chorus and not get psyched,” Vaughn says. Wilson........

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