...as fun as CAHSEE prep. THAT is ironic.

Irony is such a strange literary device. There are three types of irony:

• Dramatic irony: the reader knows something at least one of the characters in the narrative does not know. 
• Situational Irony: the outcome is different than expected.
• Verbal Irony: when narrator or character says one thing but means another.

One story which is of the greatest examples of irony is Roald Dahl's short story "Lamb to the Slaughter." Dahl uses dramatic irony when the police and detectives investigate the scene of the crime. He allows the reader to know that Mary Maloney killed her husband Patrick Maloney, yet the police were quite convinced that she was not the culprit.

Dahl also uses situational irony, which in my opinion is the most effective type of irony in the story. Without this irony, Maloney would have been in jail. The police and detectives were looking hard for hours for the murder weapon. Eventually Mary Maloney asks them to eat the lamb she made before the crime scene, and she would never eat it. Since the police were very hungry, they ate the lamb. It was the lamb Mary Maloney used to kill her husband. Instead of finding the murder weapon, the police and detectives were actually hiding it.

The title "Lamb to the Slaughter" is actually a common phrase meaning that a mentally blind person does not see the outcome of an event and therefore is happily lead by someone else to the outcome, just like a lamb does not know that its pastor is going to kill it. In the story, the husband is the lamb. This is ironic because at the beginning of the story, the wife is in love with his husband, and she eventually kills him.