Actually Ironic
i⋅ro⋅ny
–noun
“a discrepancy between the expected result and actual results when enlivened by ‘perverse appropriateness’.”
Props to The Bloggess, on whose site I saw this.
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Ironically, or perhaps more accurately coincidentally, Brett and I had a whole discussion about this yesterday, a few minutes after which the song came on the mall's speakers.
As funny as this is, the definition you give doesn't really capture what I (at least) think of as irony. Like the "black fly in your chardonnay" example would be ironic in that case, because it would be an outcome of events contrary to what was expected, as would rain on your wedding day. And a free ride when you've already paid, because if you expected a free ride, you wouldn't have paid. I don't really consider the first two ironic but to me, the free ride when you've already paid is ironic. As I said to Brett, rain on your wedding day would be ironic if you'd decided to have it in Arizona to avoid the rain in your hometown of Vancouver, or if you'd chosen to have it on the day of the year most likely to be sunny.
As for the video's "corrections," hilarious as they are, the bit about the guy afraid to fly dying in a plane crash during his first-ever plane ride is totally ironic. So Alanis didn't get everything wrong.
Oh, here's more along the lines of what I was thinking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Situational_ir…
P.S. Your embedded video above is partially cropped.
Yeah, the dictionary definition that I included here doesn't quite capture "irony" – I like the "perverse appropriateness" from the one you posted. I'm leveraging OPI on that one!
I agree that the guy afraid of flying in the original song is actually ironic (it probably would have been funnier if the parody song just said "Yup, that's one's already ironic!")
The real win in that video are the awesome backseat seizures. Hmm…singular/plural disagreement there, but who cares. I don't, and I'm a grammarian. Isn't that ironic?
How does one get to be a grammarian? I can haz that title? =P