comedy vs irony

comedy

noun
  • A humorous event. 

  • A narrative poem with an agreeable ending (e.g., The Divine Comedy). 

  • Entertainment composed of jokes, satire, or humorous performance. 

  • A light, amusing play with a happy ending. 

  • The art of composing comedy. 

  • A choric song of celebration or revel, especially in Ancient Greece. 

  • The genre of such works. 

  • A dramatic work that is light and humorous or satirical in tone. 

irony

noun
  • An ironic statement. 

  • Contradiction between circumstances and expectations; condition contrary to what might be expected. 

  • Dramatic irony: a theatrical effect in which the meaning of a situation, or some incongruity in the plot, is understood by the audience, but not by the characters in the play. 

  • Socratic irony: ignorance feigned for the purpose of confounding or provoking an antagonist. 

  • The quality of a statement that, when taken in context, may actually mean something different from, or the opposite of, what is written literally; the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention, often in a humorous context. 

adj
  • Of or pertaining to the metal iron. 

  • The food had an irony taste to it. 

How often have the words comedy and irony occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )