The Alanis Morissette song “Ironic” finally achieved the twenty third level of recursive meta-irony this week when local grad student Josh Greenberg purchased the song after a discussion with his thesis advisor. While Greenberg’s decision to purchase the single in spite of his hatred for it only achieved the 22nd level of irony–a level first reached by a Wisconsin machinist in June 2000–the fact that he did so even while understanding that his purchase was ironic reached a new level of irony. “It’s ironic that his quest for irony led him to purchase the single,” Kimberly Diaz, a noted expert on irony, explains, “because that song is still a pretty crappy song.”
Though the 23rd meta extension of irony was undertaken in a bid for a doctoral thesis topic in the field of Cognitive Science, Greenberg was disappointed when his efforts were found to be fruitless. “I thought it would be a good topic, joining the ideas of Chomsky and Searle in a purely post-modern constructivist framework. What I got was a bubble-gum-pop jingle about life’s little disappointments,” Greenberg said. “It’s kind of funny how I expended all this effort on buying this song and all it did was impede my thesis topic search,” Greenberg sighed and then added, “I’m never going to find a thesis topic in the area of irony, which is what I research.”
The 25th and final new level of irony was reached when a writer thought that Greenberg’s story would be comical and interesting to readers at large.
