Graydon Carter famously pronounced it dead after 9/11. David Foster Wallace decried it as an agent of despair and stasis in U.S. culture, but admitted liking it anyway. Jon Stewart uses it daily to engage a jaded generation in politics. Yet irony is less understood now than ever. Enter The Big Book of Irony, wherein Winokur, that master compiler of witty compendia, parses the various forms of irony; verbal irony (the act of saying one thing and meaning another), auto-irony (whereby celebrities try to humanise themselves), ambient irony (it's everywhere!), visual irony (in which images contradict themselves) and dramatic irony (the result of letting an audience know something the character's don't). With quotations that run the gamut from Samuel Johnson to George Carlin, a concise history of irony, lists of ironic phenomena, and capsule profiles of such world-class irony mongers as Sacha Baron Cohen, Dave Eggers, and Sarah Silverman, this is a fresh catalogue of the many faces of irony.