Alanis Morissette's “Ironic”: Putting an end to the debate over whether it is or isn’t

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. 

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. 

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 does so and then is indeed psyched. One hundred percent of the examples given in “Ironic” are bummers, and yet the lyrics close with a reminder that life has a funny way of helping you out. 

That’s Barthesian irony. Roland Barthes was a French literary critic who worked in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, just as Jung did. Compared to the Greeks’ understanding of it, Barthesian irony is less concerned with opposites. He simply defined it as a rhetorical device involving a double meaning. The discrepancy between the two meanings generates ambiguity and this ambiguity can push a listener to interpret the lyrics of “Ironic” in a new way. You can sing about all the bummers in “Ironic,” but do so joyfully, embracing even the hard parts of life as inevitable or necessary. Our struggles help us out. Framing something bad as somehow yielding something good is a subversive move when it allows multiple, conflicting interpretations of a song at the same time. It offers ten thousand spoons instead of one knife. This multiplication of meaning is a form of linguistic play, a turning to imagine what one might do with the unexpected bounty of ten thousand spoons. When critics dismiss “Ironic” as made up of a failed set of literal opposites, they miss the point: irony is a rhetorical whirlwind that disrupts language and undermines normativity. 

Dualistic dismissals of “Ironic” foreclose its vivacious, nonbinary complexity. “Irony does not involve the simple substitution of the opposite for the literal meaning,” said Barthes in "Elements of Semiology." “It is a form of semantic pivot which overturns the hierarchy of language, bringing into play the signified and the signifier, the explicit and the implicit, the internal and the external, the present and the absent.” By Barthesian standards, “Ironic” is ironic. This is especially true when Alanis questions whether life can be a little too ironic. The Greeks conceived of irony as pass/fail, but Alanis considers irony to be a spectrum, and she slides from side to side across the examples in the song in a manner that is definitely akin to Barthesian play. The most critics can really claim is that she didn’t do so on purpose. 

To the extent that her intentions are discernible, I agree that they should matter to our discussion here. Barthes expects irony to be done deliberately. Fortunately, life does seem to have a funny way of helping Alanis out. After she realized her erroneous deployment of the concept, she was given a shot at redemption in the opportunity to carefully consider how to position “Ironic” in the "Jagged Little Pill" Broadway musical. This was an epic chance to reject, remedy, or advance criticisms of the original album. Older and wiser Alanis did not throw the moment away, but instead positioned the critique itself within the musical to add further layers of irony. The plot of the musical updates the context of the lyrics by putting them into a writing workshop as a poem, with other characters criticizing the poem’s lack of irony. 

“Ironic” is the fifth of 10 songs in Act 1, and its beautiful reversal hunts the hunters. It laughs them right off the stage, not meanly or defensively — because they are somewhat correct about the lack of opposites in the song — but instead with a disregard for any criticism that would tend to deny the overall gorgeousness of the poem on the basis of a technicality. Rachel Syme’s foreword to the musical book says that this version of “Ironic” turns it into “an inside joke about poetic license and grammatical errors.” The song and the scene are given to Frankie, described in the musical book as an “aspiring poet, president and founder of SMAAC (The Social Movements and Advocacy Committee), proud Black woman, bisexual feminist, perennial troublemaker, revolutionary in the making.” She’s also adopted. SMAAC only has two members at first, Frankie and her best friend/girlfriend, Jo. Frankie makes mistakes but is also a strong advocate for others. 

The Writer’s Workshop classroom at Frankie’s high school is found in Act 1, Scene 5. The teacher says, “Frankie will read her piece, and we will then use constructive criticism to help her shape it into something brilliant-ish.” Frankie describes her writing, the lyrics to “Ironic,” as “an essay-poem-story-type” thing. After the first verse, Alanis included a footnote in the musical book stating, “I get it when people mock these lyrics. The real irony of all time for me is that I’m usually the grammar police. I’m usually the one going, ‘Ah, that’s not the King’s English.’” In the musical, one classmate interrupts Frankie to say, “That’s not irony, that’s just, like, s**tty.” Another classmate says it fails according to the definition of irony present in Greek tragedy. One more classmate tries to improve upon the plane crash scenario with the old man, to make it actually ironic by turning him into an airplane mechanic instead of a guy who was afraid to fly. Frankie’s love interest, Phoenix, consoles her by saying these critics are projecting, that Frankie is “obviously a great writer and their only defense is to be hyperliteral.” With renewed confidence, Frankie continues to sing as Phoenix duets on the remaining verses. 

In this version of “Ironic,” Frankie sings, “It’s like meeting the boy of my dreams and then meeting his . . .” Phoenix finishes the line with “. . . I’m not seeing anyone.” The album finishes it with “. . . beautiful wife.” The last time I saw Alanis live, she finished it with “. . . beautiful husband,” making it explicitly queer and generating extra cheers from the crowd. She left a footnote here in the musical book: “For the last eight years or so, whenever I perform it in concert, I sing ‘Meeting the man of my dreams / And then meeting his beautiful husband.’ Which is true. I have fallen in love with a lot of gay men.” I’m just obligated here, as a sidebar, to keep flagging instances of Alanis being an ally to my people. 

Diablo Cody knew she wanted to directly address the decades of controversy about “Ironic,” especially given that Alanis consistently has a playful attitude about the criticism. Cody writes that Alanis was “always open” to poking gentle fun at the song and “there is such a discourse around the inaccuracy of that song.” The use of “inaccuracy” here is telling, as if a rhetorical device could be objectively correct or not. She set the debate in an English class because it absolutely does belong there. “I would not have taken that meta approach unless I had felt that the song demanded it,” she wrote. Rather than make fun of the song, Cody forthrightly admits she wanted to “make fun of the song’s critics.” 

Celia Rose Gooding relates to the way criticism is deployed against her character, to shut her up in a grand sense just as critics tried to quiet Alanis. “People don’t like it when women speak their truth,” Gooding says in the musical book. “When you can find a little piece of something almost fractionally incorrect, it’s so easy to just say, ‘You’re wrong. You’re stupid. You don’t know what you’re talking about, girl.’” There’s the feminist seedling. We’ve covered why the broader French mode of irony that makes space for “Ironic” is superior to the Greek mode that excludes it, but we have not yet tied the irony issue to a larger conversation about sexism in the dismissal of Alanis’ work. 

For this, we turn to the work of Lauren Berlant. Berlant was one of the most influential 21st century American cultural critics, known for pioneering the field of affect studies. Though they didn’t build upon Jung directly, their examination of how emotions are socially constructed is well aligned with Jung’s notion of how archetypes format human experience. Berlant theorizes that women’s feelings are simultaneously expressed and constrained by sentimentality. The portrayal of intense emotional states tied to women’s experiences is certainly a main mission of Alanis’ body of work and could also be considered a Jungian archetype. "Jagged Little Pill" is exemplary of the psychological landscaping Berlant is interested in as a cultural expression operating at the intersection of emotion, gender and power in public life. To silo or deride the mission of Alanis is to file it away as “female complaint.” 

In Berlant’s view, irony is a key mode of expression in contemporary life because it showcases the gap between our ideals and the reality of our lived experience. It’s like meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his beautiful husband. Irony produces laughs and shrugs that help us navigate the emotional and political contradictions of everyday life. Because women are often marginalized or excluded from dominant cultural narratives, irony provides us a means to subvert them and a pressure-release valve for our ambivalence about whether transformative social change is possible. “Ironic” shows how our expectations are consistently defeated by life, yet we do get psyched when we sing it. Berlant coined the term “juxtapolitical” to describe this messy, contradictory tangle of social and emotional interconnectedness that reveals itself as we grapple with our multidimensional context, using archetypes like the bummer situations presented in the lyrics of “Ironic.” 

On top of this endorsement of irony, Berlant also theorized a post-irony characterized by meaningful sincerity, allowing us to patch or bridge the affective conflicts of public life that can’t be resolved through ironic detachment. They were a “both and” kind of theorist, just as Alanis is. Berlant thought that marginalized groups can’t afford the cruel optimism of attaching to unattainable happily-ever-after narratives, even if these American dream fantasies continue to shape culture. Between Barthes and Berlant, Alanis gets to have the black fly in her chardonnay and drink it, too. The worst-case scenario for “Ironic” here turns out to be not that bad at all. Alanis was both behind her times and ahead of them: behind in the sense that she may have botched one interpretation of irony, but ahead in the sense that her sincerity and authenticity were harbingers of a post-ironic future. In oscillating between expressing radical emotional honesty and playing with failure in her utilization of irony, she served up a prophetic glimpse of what ultimately became the standard milieu of young people at the crossroads between irony-obsessed Millennials and sincerity-possessed Gen Zers. 

Here’s a quick example of how young people still get Alanis while critical oldsters fail to learn any new tricks. In 2005, a decade after "Jagged Little Pill," the Black Eyed Peas released a song called “My Humps,” which Alanis subsequently covered ironically. She was offering a critique, a feminist rejection of the supposedly postfeminist objectification of Fergie’s hot body. The video Alanis made for it shows her elbowing a handsy dude in the face. She also slowed the tempo way down to give it a less danceable ballad vibe. Her cover went massively viral and young people briefly allowed it to rule the internet because they totally understood the “both and” of it, while those with some journalistic power often did not. Of the fact that it is still normal for Alanis to be criticized in this way, all I can say is, it figures. Some descriptions of the “My Humps” cover from male critics: not funny, smug, witless, self-conscious, pop music cannibalism, dreadful and completely missing the point. Personally — and ironically — I’m more comfortable assigning those descriptions to her critics.