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20 - Ironies in Film

from Part VI - Irony in Expressive, Nonlinguistic Media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2023

By
James MacDowell
Edited by
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr  and
Herbert L. Colston
Herbert L. Colston
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Summary

Films offer many interesting examples of irony in action. This chapter highlights the extent to which filmmakers create scenes that convey a range of both situational and verbal ironies. Films can express many types of irony (e.g., Charlie Chaplin films sometimes alerts viewers to ironic situations that the film character, Chaplin, is himself unaware of). Several of MacDowell’s arguments explicitly stand in contrast to Greg Currie’s claims that irony in film is rather limited. This chapter goes into many detailed examples of possible irony in films, including various cases of parody and dramatic irony, which greatly extend our understanding of the complexities of irony in both film and ordinary life. He later focuses on the larger, unresolved, question of whether films “contain” irony (i.e., as a property of films) or create conditions for viewers to infer their own ironic interpretations and experience particular emotional reactions (i.e., irony is an “effect” from films but not actually a property of films). MacDowell concludes that films offer viewers “invitations” to recognize an intended irony as being part of an artwork, even if that may not happen to all audiences.

Keywords

artworksexpressive ironyfilmsinvitation to ironyironic situationsparody
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought , pp. 367 - 384
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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