Laugh while the irony is hot

Excerpted from The Healing Power of Humor by Allen Klein (Penguin Putnam Inc., 2002).

Isadora Duncan, the great dancer, once suggested to George Bernard Shaw that they should have a child together: "It could inherit my beauty and your brains," she wrote to him. Shaw demurred and wrote back: "Madam, I am flattered--but suppose it turned out to have my beauty and your brains? "

Life does not always give us what we plan for. In fact, sometimes you get the complete opposite of what you might expect. That is called irony.

You have probably experienced some absurdities in your life that can be classified as ironic-you get a raise, then come home to find your rent has been increased; you find the ideal job, then two weeks later the company closes down unexpectedly; the double-scoop ice cream cone you have been craving all day suddenly slips out of your hand and winds up decorating your brand-new shoes. Comical or horrible? Laughable or ludicrous? Comic irony or a terrible situation? The choice is yours. The world supplies the irony; you supply the adjective that describes it.

Intrinsically, irony is neither sad nor funny. What makes it comic irony is when we wind up somewhere so far from where we thought we would get that it is laughable. The key to turning just plain irony into comic irony is in seeing the absurdity in the relationship between these two elements.

O. Henry's famous short story The Gift of the Magi is a good example of irony. In this classic tale, a man sells his watch to buy his wife a set of fancy combs for Christmas, while she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain. 0. Henry's tale or the firehouse burning down may not be something to laugh about immediately, but seeing a bit of the absurd in these events makes for bittersweet comedy.

The comic in comic irony is not always immediately evident. Sometimes it takes a while to see that there is indeed some humor in discovering that what you wound up with is not exactly what you intended. A cartoon, for example, shows one unhappy man poring over the plans of a canoe looking for a clue as to what could have possibly gone wrong. In the background we see the canoe he just built-the front end pointing up, the back end pointing down.

One woman saw how the best-laid plans can easily turn into an ironic comedy. One Christmas she found just the right gift for everyone on her list. She realized, however, that her busy schedule would not allow her time to wrap them, so she had the department stores do it all for her. She took pride in finishing ahead of schedule, only to discover on Christmas Eve that none of the gifts had name tags. It seemed like a tragedy, until people began opening their tagless gifts. Suddenly everyone was laughing as her eighteen-year-old brother opened the box containing the sexy silk nightgown and her grandmother got the football shoulder pads.

I remember my Aunt Jessie creating some ironic comedy on her way to the doctor's office. She was told to bring in a urine sample for testing. She searched the house for a small bottle to put it in, but all she could locate was a perfume bottle, so she used that. When she got to the doctor's office the nurse wanted the specimen, but my aunt could not find it in her shopping bag. She realized that it had fallen out onto the subway car seat. She was upset with herself for losing the urine sample, but laughter eased her loss as she realized that somewhere in New York City some young man might be giving his sweetie a bottle of what he believed was expensive Chanel No. 5.

One man in the military spoke of the irony he encountered when he was assigned a new duty post. The government would pay for moving his belongings but not his aluminum rowboat. To get around the regulation, the officer filled the boat with dirt and rows of marigolds. When the movers came, he handed them a list of his possessions, which included "one oversized aluminum planter."