Irony Man

"Isn't it ironic, don't you think?" Alanis Morrissette.

I am irony man. I just saw Iron Man 3 over the weekend, and can't help but see the irony in Robert Downey's success at this late date in his career. Robert Downey Jr. was a joke at one time and now the joke is on all the people who doubted him. From playing Iron Man in all of his movies as well as the Avengers films, he will probably make more than the combined budgets of all the correctional and rehab facilities he stayed in over the course of his bad years. Isn't it ironic that Downey is now making more than nearly all of his contemporaries put together?

Wikipedia defined irony into three categories. Verbal irony is the incongruity between what is said and what is meant. Dramatic irony is what a character believes to be true and what the reading audience to be true. Situational irony is the real result being incongruous with the result that was intended.

On a now ancient rerun of the Simpson's, the animated family saw Robert Downey Jr. supposedly having a shootout with the police. Isn't it ironic, that such a scene would be verbal, dramatic and situationally ironic? Woody Allen once said that tragedy plus time equals comedy, in Downey Jr.s case, tragedy plus time equals irony.

I'm not even going to go into the ironies in my own life--I became a better lawyer by going to film school for example and I became a better writer by returning to being a lawyer. We'll have to see what the final result will be.

Isn't that ironic?