From Television to Social Media: Persuasive Strategies Through “Intertextual Irony”

Irony is an effective discursive tool whose communicative power can be used for both social critique and manipulative concealment. It is widely exploited in media communication due to its significant persuasive potential. Novelists in the early stages of postmodernism played a key role in debunking the vacuous and manipulative nature of consumerism and entertainment culture. The pivotal tool in this demystification process was irony, which unveiled the fictional and ideological essence of Western mass cultural products by challenging and subverting the conventions of TV narrations. Nevertheless, these 1980s and 1990s writers failed to introduce a new cultural paradigm and value system that could supplant the former. Instead, they used irony as a defense mechanism to avoid taking things seriously and conceal their powerlessness against the prevailing status quo. Meanwhile, the television industry started exploiting irony against itself to deflect criticism related to its own hypocrisy, superficiality, and manipulation. In doing so, TV has become unbeatable because it appears self-critical, and thus “sincere.” Building on these ideas, this article aims to identify a particular type of irony used in advertising and clarify how this strategy has evolved from the era of televisions dominance to the supremacy of social media. Through a semiotic perspective, the concept of “intertextual irony” is discussed as specific kind of irony that breaks traditional textual rules to establish complicity with viewers and induce them to align with the behaviors prompted by the advertisements, thus overcoming their skepticism. A pragmatic definition of the concept of irony will be preliminarily offered through the perspective of the Speech Act Theory. This methodology, previously tested only on verbal irony, will be transposed to a metatextual dimension to define “intertextual irony.” After the development of the latter category, it will be applied to the analysis of the short commercial for the NooN nail polish line by the Italian rapper and influencer Fedez, published on his Instagram profile in April 2021.