Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are filled with ironies and paradoxes: Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday---but never jam to-day. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. (Nilsenandamp; Nilsen 219-220)
People who can’t get a job until they have experience and who can’t get experience until they have a job are in a Catch-22. So are authors who can’t get their manuscripts published until they have an agent but can’t get an agent until they have been published. A newspaper story under the headline 'Texas in Catch-22' told about a Texas state law forbidding the execution of anyone insane. A prisoner on death row refused to take the medication that would keep him sane. This is the kind of irony illustrated by many urban legends and contemporary novels, films, and plays. (Nilsenandamp; Nilsen 219)
The Greek philosophers often wrestled with paradoxes. The most famous was credited to the Cretan philosopher Epimenides: 'All Cretans are liars.' Epimenides was a Cretan. Therefore, If he is lying, then the statement must be true. But if the statement is true, he must be lying. (Nilsenandamp; Nilsen 219)
There are three different types of irony: Verbal, Dramatic and Situational