Short Stories for High School: Focus on Irony
For our final entry in our Best Short Stories for High School series, we’re looking at ironic short stories we’ve enjoyed using to teach irony and related devices. If you’re looking for short stories that provide great opportunities to focus on plot structure, characterization, point of view, or symbolism, be sure to go back and check out our previous posts in the series.
Irony can be a lot of fun to teach, but it can also be really challenging for students to wrap their minds around. However, it’s important, not only for our PreAP and AP students who need to be able to discuss it appropriately in literature classes and the AP exam, but for all students: it forms the basis for large swaths of our popular culture, and unlike other literary devices, when we misunderstand (or miss altogether) an author’s use of irony, we run the risk of taking away the opposite meaning than the one the author intended.
Ironic Short Stories for the High School Classroom

One of our best standard-level units, back when we were working under the California state standards instead of the Common Core standards, was our unit on irony, contradictions, ambiguity, subtlety (just pronouncing this one was a lesson on its own!), and incongruity.
Because these were challenging terms for our students, many of whom were English Language Learners, to identify and explain on their own, we spent a lot of time practicing the skill with a variety of highly engaging texts.
We analyzed the use of irony to create humor in images, the ambiguity in poorly worded headlines, and contradiction and subtlety in hypothetical everyday examples. We looked for examples of these devices in childrens’ picture books: Cinder Edna; The Frog Prince, Continued; and Just a Dream. We watched an episode of The Office (one of our Top 6 TV Episodes to Use in Class) and practiced identifying examples of each term. Students were highly engaged in these activities and got better at identifying the devices as we went along.
Once we were ready to tackle a grade-level text, our favorite was Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” (1954). The pregnant Mary Maloney serenely waits for her husband to come home from work so she can fix him a drink and hear about his day, but when he arrives, he downs a glass of whiskey and gives her some bad news (presumably that he is leaving her and their unborn child). In shock and denial, she goes down to the freezer to get a frozen lamb leg to prepare for dinner hoping her husband will “forget” the whole scene. When she returns upstairs, she suddenly hits her husband over the head with it, killing him.
The rest of the story describes Mrs. Maloney’s attempts to cover up her crime and ultimately ends with her feeding the now-cooked murder weapon to the police officers who are there to investigate her husband’s untimely death. It’s easy to see why the textbook publishers selected the story—it’s rife with examples of irony—and students found it both engaging and accessible. Students also enjoyed diagnosing Mrs. Maloney as a psychopath after watching the Alfred Hitchcock Presents adaptation of the story.
(Note: If you want to kick it 90s-style-old-school–or just check it out yourself–the “Murder She Roast” episode of the television show Wings is loosely based on the story and is a fun iykyk after reading and discussing the story.)
Our textbook also included excerpts from Jon Krakauer’s Outside magazine article “Into Thin Air” (September 1996), which he eventually developed into a full-length nonfiction book. We had to do a significant amount of frontloading since our Southern California students had little familiarity with mountaineering lingo, but the 1998 IMAX documentary Everest, filming during the same storm Krakauer writes about, provided students with helpful visuals. Students were interested in the story (especially the connections between what they saw and what they read), and Krakauer draws conclusions at the end of the article that allow us to discuss his use of irony to support more serious themes than those in “Lamb to the Slaughter.”
We had a harder time finding ironic short stories that worked in our AP class (the best one in our textbook was Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode,” but recommending Woody Allen anything feels a bit problematic).
We had the most success when we stopped using short stories and instead used Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Students enjoyed both the play and the 2002 film, but that’s a blog post for another day.
One short story frequently used in AP classes (which we taught once) that provides multiple clear examples of irony for beginning literary scholars is Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894). The protagonist’s reaction to her husband’s death (wow, we’re leaning heavily on the irony-related dead husbands here, aren’t we?) opens the door for meaningful discussions about changing perspectives on women’s roles and experiences.
As challenging as teaching irony can be (for us and for our students), it definitely requires students to demonstrate the critical thinking skills we’re hoping to develop in them as English teachers. And with the right texts, teaching irony can be a lot of fun.
What are your go-to texts for teaching irony? What are your favorite ironic short stories? How do you break down this challenging concept for your burgeoning scholars? Reach out to [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works and tell us what fantastic texts we’ve missed!