In an episode where superhero Irony Man (a pun on Iron Man) likens his superpowers to lyrics from Morissette's song, causing his cohorts to rename him " The Man from Alanis" (a pun on The Man from Atlantis). Popular satirists Berger and Wyse also parodied the song in their cartoon strip The Pitchers. That's quite ironic." Byrne then tries to give the song 'the benefit of the doubt' by coming up with scenarios where the various unfortunate incidents, mentioned in the song, actually would represent irony. Irish comedian Ed Byrne has performed a skit in which he jokingly attacks the song for its lack of ironies: "The only ironic thing about that song is it's called 'Ironic' and it's written by a woman who doesn't know what irony is. It is worth noting that both lines of the chorus, Isn't it ironic / Don't you think?, are ironic in the strictest literary sense. All that 'Ironic' touches on spawned all my future inquiries into and current understandings of the mysteries of life. For me the sweetest moment came in New York when a woman came up to me in a record store and said, 'So all those things in the "Ironic" aren't ironic.' And then she said, 'And that's the irony.' I said, 'Yup.' To me it's a real snapshot of a nineteen-year-old's definition and version of how life worked at the time. It's a testament to the fact that we didn't think it was going to be put under the microscope by 30 million people. And when Glen and I were writing it, we definitely were not doggedly making sure that everything was technically ironic. I'd always embraced the fact that every once in a while I'd be the malapropism queen.
Morissette has also confirmed that she is a self-dubbed " malapropism queen" and alleges that the song was lighthearted and not taken too seriously at the time it was written: “įor me the great debate on whether what I was saying in 'Ironic' was ironic wasn't a traumatic debate. The title also provides the best directions for the reader as to how the text should be read by acting as a constraint on potential interpretations or schemata instantiation. 2: a course of events or a condition which has the opposite result from what is expected (Quirk, 1987, p. 558).
The lexical item "Ironic" is referred to its semantic meaning "expressing irony" (Quirk, 1987, p. 558) and "irony" defined as: 1: use of words which are clearly opposite to one's meaning to be amusing or to show annoyance. Two situations that Morissette describes in the song are arguably examples of cosmic irony: events that, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, appear "as if in mockery of the fitness or rightness of things", such as "a death row pardon/two minutes too late". The song's usage of the word " ironic" attracted attention for what some think is an improper application of the term. It is set in the key of B major and it starts with the sequence of Emaj7–F♯6–Emaj7–F♯6, as its chord progression, but then it turns to F♯–A♯–Badd2–F♯–A♯–G♯m7. According to the sheet music published at by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, it is a pop rock song, set in the time signature of common time, composed in a moderate tempo of eighty-two beats per minute. I thought 'I don't know what this is-what genre it is-who knows? It's just good '". He commented "I'm telling you, within 15 minutes we were at it-just writing.
In an interview with Christopher Walsh of Billboard, Ballard explained how he and Morissette met, and how "Ironic" was wrote. "Ironic" was written by Alanis Morissette and Glen Ballard, and produced by the latter.