What Irony is Really About: Superiority Without Responsibility

The word "irony" is much misused, so much so that reflecting the situation the writers of Teen Titans Go! actually had one episode in which such misuse by other members of the team had Robin devoting much of one of their adventures to explaining the concept, to the point of giving them an eighth grade English class explanation of the differences between verbal, dramatic and situational irony (as they went through one of their adventures, of course).

Sound as far as it went, it was also consistent with the fact that even those who actually use the word "irony" with impeccable correctness from the standpoint of denotation and syntax are not often sensitive to what it means to look at others and their troubles "ironically," namely the sense of superiority without responsibility involved, for instance, "I can see that this person is heading for a fall, but I can just sit back and enjoy that."

It is the outlook of the self-satisfied aristocrat without respect, sympathy, empathy for lesser beings, whose destruction he takes as entertainment, and the history of art being what it is, pervasive across our inheritance of higher culture, widespread today, and altogether absolutely irresistible to a middlebrow mind--which is why we see so much of it about, all as it is a rare occurrence that anyone points out that this might not be an entirely healthy state.