Many years ago when I was in 6th grade, I had what I thought at the time was a “hip” school assignment. Here’s another person who did this analysis. Our English class was given the Alanis Morisette song, “Ironic” and asked to dissect it for actual forms of irony because it’s actually full of things that are NOT irony, simply bad luck or unfortunate timing. Results are as follows:
An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day
It's a black fly in your Chardonnay
It's a death row pardon two minutes too late (*.5)
And isn't it ironic... don't you think
It's like rain on your wedding day
It's a free ride when you've already paid
It's the good advice that you just didn't take
Who would've thought... it figures
Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down he thought
"Well isn't this nice..."
And isn't it ironic... don't you think
It's like rain on your wedding day
It's a free ride when you've already paid
It's the good advice that you just didn't take
Who would've thought... it figures
Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out when
You think everything's gone wrong and everything blows up
In your face
A traffic jam when you're already late
A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break
It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife
It's meeting the man of my dreams
And then meeting his beautiful wife
And isn't it ironic...don't you think
A little too ironic...and, yeah, I really do think...
It's like rain on your wedding day
It's a free ride when you've already paid
It's the good advice that you just didn't take
Who would've thought... it figures
Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
Life has a funny, funny way of helping you out
Helping you out
Attempts at describing irony: 11
Successful attempts: 2.5
Confusion of irony with "poor sense of timing": 6
Completely missing the term: 3
Not a whole lot of irony actually and just a whole lot of “bad timing”.
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Robbie always tries to play big with music and music rights. It’s a good storytelling tool, as recently demonstrated by our ending “Last Supper” editing. As snowlantern and @4persephone discuss here the mention of the song Ironic, and subsequent referrals by Metatron, seems to be a case of the show unable to afford the music rights in an already tightly-packed episode, budget wise. A lot of Metatron’s dialogue involves this song (and theme therein) needing to have been played/mentioned so we got the Robert Singer voiceover instead. I’m not going to talk about Cas though. I’m going to talk about Sam and the show. From a character development perspective, the irony in season 10 with Sam is that it is he, and not Dean (who is looking towards the future), that has taken up the mantle of “I can’t have my own life and lover so I’m going to save my brother to keep the status quo and not break the cycle that would allow these things in our lives”... and he does it by ignoring good advice (which counts as irony since as the linked analysis says, the listener suffers some kind of befitting karmic punishment as a result, which is definitely coming). Sam is now the one “towing the Dean Winchester party line”, both talking the talk and walking the walk.
Here is a man that just went through a horrible possession ordeal, a gross violation of will that resulted in the death of an innocent, family, someone he swore to protect after not looking for, a man who by every means KNOWS EXACTLY what is involved in deals involving unknown supernatural elements and a person of questionable moral and ethical standards, and yet... he fully makes a decision to put himself in Dean’s shoes from a structural season 9 perspective.
Perhaps the real irony is that this show has gone on longer than everyone planned and so we’ve had to make this “lesson” come full circle (also a theme, along with “making things square”, a tagged theme which basically serves as “Sam is the new Dean” because I talk about these things that we are getting now like a year ago) with Sam by having him “do the opposite” of what 9x10 Sam would do, how the “lesson” could/should have gone then... Perhaps that’s not even it either because as I type this I can’t actually say I didn’t see this coming (that this is the opposite of what I thought would happen), because this is all stuff I and others have been talking about since before the end of season 9, and it’s something that even fits the pattern from the structural season previous, whereas season 8 set the tone for the season 9 scenario, coincidentally, in an episode by Robbie Thompson. The only thing for me that would be ironic now is that if Sam indeed didn’t do exactly what I see he’s about to do, so in that sense there’s not really anything ironic with this progression of storytelling at all. This is simply rain on a wedding day. :/
