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“IRONIC”:

COMEDY OF
ERRORS

“Ironic,” the third single off of Jagged Little Pill, came out in February of 1996 and was an immediate, polarizing hit. The chorus is undeniable—who can hear the hook without wanting to belt “It’s like raiiiiiiiin on your wedding day” at the top of their lungs?—but almost as soon as the song came out, Morissette’s critics began questioning whether or not her lyrics were grammatically correct. Is a “black fly in your Chardonnay” an example of dramatic irony or just plain, old-fashioned bad luck? Is “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife” ironic or just a deeply inconvenient cutlery error? In Reality Bites, a film about ennui-laden Gen Xers that came out in 1994, when Morissette was writing the songs for Jagged Little Pill, Winona Ryder says, “I can’t really define irony, but I know it when I see it.” Perhaps Morissette’s definition worked much the same way; she was pointing out bizarre coincidences and odd twists of fate in order to try to get closer to an overriding absurdity she saw in the world. Later, in an interview, she would say that she never expected listeners to take the song so literally. “Although there are times where I’m grammatically very intense and very perfectionistic, there are other times where clearly I don’t care,” she said. “I make up words, and I play with words linguistically like they’re paint.”

Despite her critics, Morissette has a playful sense of humor around the song and its malapropisms. You can even see her poking fun at herself in the original music video, in which she plays four different versions of herself sitting

in the same car, in four different colored sweaters. One of her characters is thoughtful and serious, but another makes mischief throughout the ride, sticking her head out the window to sing, her long brown hair flapping in the breeze like a dog’s ears. Over the years, Morissette has come to love the controversy around “Ironic” and believes that the song is all the more lovable for its linguistic foibles. She says the arguments around the lyrics have led her to feel more humble about her own mistakes. “A lot of people are afraid of not being intelligent,” she says. “But I am clearly really, really intelligent, and also not intelligent, and it depends on where you catch me.”

When it came to putting “Ironic” in the context of a Broadway musical, Diablo Cody, who wrote the book, knew right away that she wanted to address the elephant in the room head-on. “I mean, there is such a discourse around the inaccuracy of that song,” Cody says. From the draft of the script, she knew she wanted to set the song inside a high school English class, with Frankie reading the lyrics out loud as part of a poetry workshop. “I would not have taken that meta approach unless I had felt that the song demanded it,” Cody adds. As Frankie recites her lines about “a traffic jam when you’re already late,” her classmates rag on her for not quite deploying the correct grammar. Instead of feeling humiliated, Frankie stands up boldly for her artistic decisions. She also has backup: the new kid in school, Phoenix, tells her to ignore the haters. Frankie and Phoenix end up singing the song’s rousing chorus in harmony, falling for each other a little bit in the process.

Cody insists that this comedic approach is a valentine to Morissette’s hit rather than an indictment of it. “I think the song’s amazing,” Cody says. “It wasn’t at all like, ’We’re ashamed of “Ironic.” Let’s make fun of it.’ That was never the intent. It was more like, ’Let’s make fun of the song’s critics.’”

For her part, Celia Rose Gooding, who plays Frankie, says “I love the way [Diablo] put ’Ironic’ in the show. I think it’s so perfect, Frankie being this writer sharing this, what