The Book of Irony: An Introduction

The following is a rough guide to the holy text of the church of irony, sensibly called The Book of Irony, or sometimes Pilgrim's Pirouette. It is called many other things that will not be printed here today. Among the church's faithful it is widely considered to be outmoded, historically inaccurate, self-contradictory, and morally ambiguous -- in short, it is a flawless guide for modern living. It contains, among other things:

• Opening aphorism: "One does not carry sand into the desert, nor coal to Newcastle. The sick man shall go to the hospital and the heavy man to the gymnasium. Why then do you go about blessing the blessed?"
• Retroactive subway system proposals for ancient Sumer and Babylon.
• Apologia for the existence of the preceding, founded upon comparative underworld mythologies.
• A brief primer on the concept of anagnorisis, on which someone has drawn a spoon.
• Pencil sketches of street performers.
• Headlines from the Washington Times and New York Post, painstaking cut & rearranged into headlines from the New York Times and Washington Post.
• An extensive refutation of the previous item, with a convincing argument for the reverse.
• A crossword puzzle, in which every clue has been replaced with the phrase "SUCK IT."
• A set of traditional Zen koans, each with the exclamation "How ironic!" tacked on at the end.
• A chapter of self-referential parables, including "Consider the Mandelbrot Set".
• The final section is a series of blank pages with the heading "Beatitudes". It has been left as an exercise for the reader.
• In this section, on the last page, there is a handwritten Post-It note with the suggestion, "Blessed are the wicked."
• On the inside back cover, an order form for other religious texts from the same publisher. Among them
  • Putting the You Back in J-you-daism!
  • Zen and the Art of Religious Posturing
  • Mormon-y, More Problems
• The back cover itself is, out of a somewhat belated sense of shame, disguised as the Audubon Society Guide to the Birds of North America.