Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 14

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Popular Culture Review
did was lop the head off. It makes the point. If there's any confusion about the
symbolism, that now goes away.”13 Added Mandalay Bay president Glenn
Schaeffer, the pigeon droppings give Lenin “that lived-on, urban look which
authenticates the version of the statue which is most prevalent today.”
But the narrative does not end there. In the process of removal, Lenin's
head disappeared. Some feared it had been stolen; others accused the hotel of
staging a publicity stunt. At any rate, a $5000 reward was offered for a “250
pound, two foot high and 15 inches wide, with mustache and beard, bald head
with a weathered bronze look.”15 Three weeks later, in early June 1999, the
missing head was discovered at a local thrift shop where it had been dropped off
anonymously in the middle of the night along with a huge pallet of other
donated items. The head was returned to the hotel where it was frozen in a block
of ice and placed as a table in the center of the vodka locker.16 This action seems
to have satisfied the critics, and Red Square is more popular than ever as an
eating and drinking establishment on the contemporary Las Vegas scene.
The Analysis
When Red Square first opened, several local columnists wrote cleverly
about the great irony of finding Lenin in Las Vegas, a proletarian hero in a city
which epitomizes capitalism run amuck, where slot machines are the opiate of
the masses.17 But is this glib observation correct? What exactly is irony, a word
heard frequently in the media, in the classroom, and in everyday conversation; a
word whose definition is vague, unstable, and multiformed; a word which
nonetheless has achieved full colloquial status together with a certain
modishness that has led “how ironic” to best “what a coincidence” and even
“how odd” in the vernacular.
Definitions of Irony
In common usage, the term irony seems to refer to situations in which
“circumstances have defeated certain expectations, in which fate has repudiated
someone’s intentions or labors.” A little probing, however, indicates that irony is
far more complex and virtually impossible to define. The term irony has a long
rhetorical history and there is an extensive, if somewhat obscure, body of
literature devoted to its analysis, most of which, however, is inconclusive. After
considerable research, one scholar concluded that trying to explain irony was
like trying to explain why the Sphinx was smiling when she told Odysseus her
riddle.18
Similarly, Andrew Wright noted that the difficulties with irony stem
not from the fact that it has no definitions but from the fact that it has too
many.19 A.R. Thompson argues that irony is only irony when the effect is one of
mingled pain and amusement,20 while Guido Almansi suggests that the truly
ironic is the ambiguously ironic.21 Meanwhile, other writers have identified