The Voice Of An Underdog Analysis

Review

Merriam Webster defines irony as “A pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning.” This is a less commonly used definition of irony, but is key to how Conrad makes critiques in his novels. The Oxford English Dictionary defines irony as “The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.” This definition focuses more on the way irony is used to create humor in text rather than expose an underlying truth, but both are similar in that the result is one that is not expected by the subject. The Oxford Dictionary also defines irony as “A state of affairs

One is to create tension to grip the audience, which by extension, allows the audience to feel more involved in the character’s arc. As well as this it can used to highlight situations in comedy as a “hypocrite or deceiver become entangled in an ‘untruth’”. However, as the audience has greater knowledge than other characters in the story, it can become humorous to know the outcome. In ‘The voice of an Underdog’ by William Empson, he talks about a professor Booth who believes that the term ‘irony’ is used too loosely and there should by another term “stable irony” in order to understand the change. He says that it is “stable or fixed, in the sense that once a reconstruction of meaning has been made, the reader is not then invited to undermine it with further demolitions and reconstructions.” This means that it is not up to the reader to re-interpret the meaning of a situation if the writer has already established

The song begins with a list of ironically tragic scenarios. The first being, “I met a homeless man named Rich.” The irony being that Rich is both short hand for Richard and the description of a wealthy person despite him being homeless. This list of irony slowly descends into darker references such as, “The Holocaust and 9/11 that shits funny 24/7.” The perfect rhyme of ‘9/11 and 24/7’ and the syllable count being equal in both halves of the sentence make the line almost cheerful in tone adding to the satire. This slow change from light jokes to real world taboos like ‘9/11’ allows Burnham to push the line of dark humour and search for the limit of when people will stop finding the joke funny. He also arrives at this point by using expletives such as ‘shit’ to make the humour more