We experience irony in various ways other than through language. This chapter describes how irony often emerges in different modalities of human expression (e.g., talk, gesture, music, photography, dance, art). People’s conscious realizations that something is irony do not completely capture many unconscious ironic conceptualizations, including acts that are unintentionally ironic. People also sometimes call these out for others to attend to and engage in divergent nonverbal ironic performances, all of which illustrate the importance of bodily experience in ironic thinking, language, and action. Gibbs et al. specifically argue that irony is as much an appraisal process through which people deal with incompatibilities in their varied experiences (i.e., the appraisal theory of irony), as it is a particular type of meaning product. People may not simply possess a single conception of irony that is applicable to all situations in the same way. Individuals may differ, for example, in whether they view two contrasting events as just correlated as opposed to having some causal relationship with one another. The varied ways we think about, and emotionally react to, contrasts between expectations and unfolding realities leads to a family resemblance of both unconscious and conscious realizations of irony.

This chapter explores the ways irony unfolds in music. Turner and DiBernardo examine representative pop songs, both original compositions and cover versions, to suggest several ways that irony is created and perhaps detected by listeners. As they argue, “Musical irony requires an interpretive ear for hearing contradictory or disjunctive sounds (and lyrics) within a musical context.” But inferring irony from music involves a special challenge given that music lacks it own semantic or representational signification. Lyrics are clearly a driving force in expressing ironic intent, but instrumental sounds often interact with the spoken words to convey richer ironic complexes, including both rhetorical and situational ironies. Listeners may be especially attentive to the tension, or the discrepancy, between the musical form, style, or genre of a song (e.g., the upbeat, lyrical form in Randy Newman’s song “Political Science”) and its lyrical content (e.g., the use of weapons of mass destruction). Many musical ironies may be “post-modern” because of their self-referential style (e.g., not just criticizing others, but ourselves as well). This chapter offers a compelling, beautifully detailed, argument that “music is a largely underexplored wellspring of ironic activity.”