It's always a bit of a challenge "explaining" irony to someone who more or less doesn't get it. I was listening to an English tutor try to explain it to a high school student and (like the meddlesome eavesdropper I apparently am) decided to try to think up a good example from recent memory.

The example that occurred to me was Brad Pitt's performance in the recent film Inglorious Basterds. The setup (just in case someone reads this who hasn't seen the film) is that Brad Pitt's character is a gritty American insurgent conducting a guerilla campaign in Nazi-occupied France. The course of the campaign eventually puts the American commander in a situation where he must pretend to be Italian, an acting job for which he is both supremely unequipped and dispositionally adverse to.

So we have the much-maligned actor (Brad Pitt), playing a guy who literally can't act to save his life. But that in itself isn't the irony. What we see when the film rolls is an American guerilla faced with an acting job he is not only ill-equipped to do, but hopelessly unmotivated for. And Brad Pitt owns this role. He crushes it. Apparently, it's a role his entire Hollywood carreer has prepared him for. That's the funny part.

So, any better examples? Shoot me down? Have I got it all wrong?