Ironic anything

White Melburnians are smart enough to know that being stuck in a traffic jam when you're already late is not ironic. It might be if you were the head of VicRoads driving to a meeting where you were to give a presentation called: "The Myth of Congestion: why Melbourne's roads are always empty".

Overusing irony is dangerous because it can detract from the richness of our experiences by forcing everything to be engaged with in only one way - through the prism of irony. Irony also requires an emotional detachment that further limits the range of possible reactions to our experiences.

But Melbourne white people are not going to confuse simple bad luck with irony because they discovered irony way back in 1991, during Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit video. The camera panned across a group of cheerleaders who had anarchy symbols on their uniforms. Ever since then, irony has played a pivotal role in white Melburnian culture. As white Melburnians are generally poor at sports, it leaves them only one way through which to demonstrate alpha status - via intelligence. By flaunting their grasp of an abstract notion such as irony Melbourne white people assert their position at the top of the social order. In fact, white Melburnians love irony so much they are quite happy to settle for garden-variety sarcasm, making irony an ironically easy concept for everyone to employ.