Remembering the Amelia Bedelia books (in which a lovable housekeeper takes everything so literally that when she’s asked to put out the lights, she hangs the light bulbs on the clothes line) reminds me what a difficult time I had with that book. I was a volunteer tutor for an eight year old at the school down the street. He was a charming kid, labeled a slow learner, and he was. We were reading an Amelia Bedelia story together, and he simply could not see the joke. Baffling, really, how the mind works, or doesn’t. When I taught high school English, there were invariably several students in the class who missed every moment of irony. I eventually developed lessons specifically designed to “teach” irony. One lesson involved a page full of set-ups like this: “A man is terrified of flying, fearing he’ll die in a crash, so when he has to go across country, he decides to drive. Half way through his trip, he’s driving along the highway when ______.” Most of the kids immediately shout out, “An airplane falls on him!”

But some of the students looked at us blankly. Just didn’t get it. And I suspect they never will. Their minds just don’t work that way. (These were not “slow-learner” kids – just average, normal folks, missing the irony gene.)