Tuesday, April 21, 2015

"New Orleans Man Drowns at Party for Lifeguards"

News from 1985

 
Via Reddit

6 comments:

AllenS said...

Alcohol was a contributing factor.

edutcher said...

Define irony...

KCFleming said...

A death at the National Funeral Directors Association's annual meeting would not be ironic but consistent.

Rabel said...

Let's try to avoid any stereotypes.

Methadras said...

The irony, it killz!!!

Chip Ahoy said...

Drowning in a pool is a tragedy.

Drowning in a pool with lifeguards all around is criminal negligence.

Drowning in a pool with lifeguards all around while celebrating a drowning-free year is a macabre coincidence.

Now, had the victim been the gentleman who dismissed the lifeguards saying, "Go on lads, enjoy yourselves. Have a drink. The tide has gone on this party, the whole thing was circling the drain anyway, go liven it up, the party is sinking." Then that would be ominous in retrospect.

If the victim was the father of one of the lifeguards and also the brother of a friend of another lifeguard's sister who had a daughter that that went to war and saved a man from drowning and then returned and without knowing each other previously she married the lifeguard who is the son of the victim and together they have a child that they named after the victim and due to their personal experiences with drownings instilled in their son the need for water competence and urged him to become a lifeguard so all his summers were spent doing mastering all swimming competitions but he rejected all that swimming-related indoctrination and became an accountant instead. But his job as accountant had him travel a lot by air until one day a passenger jet crashed with him on it and they landed in water rather far out from shore and they were all stuck out there helpless until somebody could swim out to shore with a cable so they could get started transferring, and nobody on the airplane knew how to swim except the accountant named after a drowning victim. And that could be somewhat ironic were it not so annoying.

Irony is an unexpected consequence, by definition, I think, but for solid classical irony the tale must turn back on itself. The story must do a loop, preferably a loop with a twist or a flip, like an 8. Weave together two such looped tales and what do you have? 88, that's what. No. You have splendid double double looped tale with ironic elements. Like O. Henry. Use him as a model and you cannot go wrong with comprehending irony.