It’s easy to forget, in the wake of the various thudding political and cultural broadsides it’s provoked, that irony ever had anything to do with subtlety. Most commentators and critics have comfortably equated the ironic mood with a smirking refusal to feel anything much beyond jaded pop-culture connoisseurship.
But irony remains a supple, indispensable literary device, squaring comically misguided human desires and aspirations smartly against their messier worldly outcomes. Put another way, the antithesis of irony, the great idiom of unintended consequences, is not earnestness or sincerity, as is now so widely assumed, but tragedy—the blank hand of fate remorselessly stamping out consequences, blithely oblivious to our own puny intentions. Since it highlights the folly of our longings against the indifference of the cosmos, irony is one of the only ways to register a feeble protest against this state of affairs while keeping something like a smile on one’s face.
--Chris Lehmann quoted in The Big Book of Irony
See also: How philosophy is like humor
I think, though, the best defense of irony/humor/mockery was made succinctly by Robert Lanham:
Irony has more resonance than reason.
That doesn’t make irony/humor/mockery good, however. It’s morally neutral. Here’s Judith Shulevitz:
Irony is not for anything. It has no higher purpose. It is a perspective on the world, one that takes advantage of distance and some weirdly skewed point of view to see everyday things—pomposity, convention, higher purposes, and the earnest advancement of points like this one—as ridiculous or sad or just somehow other than what they usually seem. It’s a lens that is morally neutral, deployed for evil as easily as for good.
I’d quibble and say that irony/humor/mockery tends toward "goodness" because it’s hard to make funnies out of something that is reasonable or non-absurd. But don’t take my word for it; take Scott Adams's.
