There is something special about the way irony tickles our brains. After all, we tend to enjoy a good surprise, or at least something that subverts our expectations. Fortunately, helpful people from ...

Adapted from "Irony and Sarcasm" by Roger Kreuz (MIT Press, 2020). Reprinted with permission from MIT Press. In February 1996, Alanis Morissette released the fourth single from “Jagged Little Pill,” ...

As the great British comic, Ricky Gervais once implied, England and America may not so much be divided by a common tongue, but by their distinctive use (and in the case of the Brits, their abuse) of ...

Irony has a special place in the human psyche. Otherwise mundane concepts suddenly come to life when they’re recognized to have an ironic quality. British comedian David Mitchell captures this ...

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 ...

The apartment was furnished minimally, brimming with partygoers clumped into two semipermeable groups. One encircled the island of booze in the kitchen, the other scattered into overlapping clusters ...

OK, that headline is a bit hyperbolic, but not as hyperbolic as you might think. Using magnetic resonance imaging, scientists seem to have located a part of the brain centrally involved in grasping ...