The Differential Role of Ridicule in Sarcasm and Irony

Abstract

Kreuz and Glucksberg (1989) argued that sarcasm and irony are similar in that both are forms of reminder, yet different in that sarcasm conveys ridicule of a specific victim whereas irony does not. This article reports two experiments that provide empirical evidence of this relation. In both experiments, undergraduates read a series of passages. One group rated a target utterance in terms of the extent to which it was a good example of sarcasm, and a second group rated it in terms of the extent to which it was a good example of irony. In Experiment 1, a manipulation of ridicule was found to affect the participants' ratings of sarcasm hut not their ratings of irony. In Experiment 2, it was found that ratings of the extent to which an utterance ridiculed a specific victim were correlated with sarcasm to a greater extent than with irony. These findings provide support for the notion that ridicule of a specific victim is one way in which sarcasm differs from irony.