When I was on the speech team in high school (acho-GEEK), I did a Programmed Reading piece on Irony. I took it to state finals in San Francisco and saw my first peep show at 15... so geek on that homie. .
Anyway, my stuff was from Winnie the Pooh (regarding Eyeore's response to racing sticks of Pooh and Piglet) and some Thurber.
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It occurs to me, in retrospect, that gentle irony is a lost art today. There is no room for gentle irony, a form of communication wherein parties agree that each other are worthy of respect and still can take a joke.
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Instead, we have become a mean sarcastic Greek chorus to the rubes on reality TV. If you have a moment, go back and read a Winnie the Pooh story. Take a look at old Dr. Seuss. Even Pee Wee Herman employed a gentle, pleasant ironic face to the world to make daily life better.
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These have been replaced by the irony free zones for kids (teletubbies) or hip sarcastic heroes like Captain Underpants or Johnny Neutron. Graduation from youth to young adult moves from this to raunchy, literal and mean spirited comments (listen to hip hop - I dare you).
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I think that this lack of irony in real life is one of the reasons why I enjoy some situation comedy that uses gentle irony without making the characters look like idiots. I like How I Meet Your Mother for just this reason. And, I like The Big Bang Theory when it doesn't stray into mean territory.
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As for the written word, irony is a lost cause. Blogs, twitter and partisanship prefer to hammer people over the head with opinions rather than allow thoughts float to the surface, revealing their meanings slowly. Even popular fiction has lost the gentle banter and give and take of irony.
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Sometimes I think the loss of self-deprecation and gentle joking will ill serve us in the future. We have become painfully literal and earnest, with no tolerance for other opinions, no matter how stated. Irony used to be a way to gently disagree - not a sledge hammer the piont home.
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Just a random thought.