“But who are the participants in this social act called ‘irony’? The party line says that there is an intending ‘ironist’ and her/his intended audiences — the one that ‘gets’ and the one that doesn’t ‘get’ the irony. What do you do, then, with the obvious fact that ironies exist that are not intended, but are most certainly interpreted as such? Similarly, there are ironies you might intend, as ironist, but which remain unperceived by others. Irony’s indirection complicates considerably the various existing models of intersubjective communication between a speaker and a hearer (see Hernadi 1988: 749; Adams 1985: 1). With irony, there are, instead, dynamic and plural relations among the text or utterance (and its context), the so-called ironist, the interpreter, and the circumstances surrounding the discursive situation; it is these that mess up neat theories of irony that see the task of the interpreter simply as one of decoding or reconstructing some ‘real’ meaning (usually named as the ‘ironic’ one) (Booth 1974; Karstetter 1964), a meaning that is hidden, but deemed accesible, behind the stated one. If this were actually the case, irony’s politics would be much less contentious, I suspect”

— Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge