Isn't it ironic? Defining the scope of humorous irony

Abstract This paper takes as its bedrock a neo-Gricean definition of the trope of irony, championing two essential conditions for diagnosing its presence: overt untruthfulness (or pretence) arising from flouting the first maxim of Quality, together with evaluative implicature, i.e., implied (negative) evaluation. The paramount aim here is to delineate the boundaries of humorous irony, a term frequently overused both in everyday discourse and in academic research, vis-à-vis a range of distinct humor forms. Arguing in favour of a need for terminological and conceptual rigidity, the author indicates a few types of humor (teasing, absurdity, parody, and sarcasm) and potentially humorous phenomena (bald-faced lying, as well as metaphor, hyperbole and metonymy) which appear to meet at least one of the two conditions and, as a result, tend to be mistakenly labeled as (humorous) irony. The theoretical discussion is illustrated with humorous examples taken from the television series