thinking about WWI, we are looking at a period in which the concept ofirony was on the brink of the rapid expansion that it would undergo duringthe rest of the century. If Fussell is right about the link of WWI to modernironic understanding, the war may also have contributed to the expansionof the concept.The present research applies current ideas about irony to Shaw’s de-scriptions of situations and his use of verbal techniques. Rather than exam-ining the role of irony in creative thought, for much of this research we areexamining those definitions of paradox and wit from earlier in the centurythat are now considered forms of irony. But the changes in our conceptsof irony are still important. We will return to this issue when we considerwhat this research may mean for us, at the beginning of the 21st century.Irony as Creative ThoughtToday’s theories tend to define irony along a number of axes. We canthink of irony as verbal or situational; as dynamic or structure; as overt orcovert; as stance or meaning; as isolated incidents or broad world views.In the initial leg of our own journey we will consider Shaw’s thinking inrelation to these aspects of irony.Foranyconsiderationofirony,wealsohavetheoriesfrommultipledis-ciplines. There are the long Western traditions of irony in literature, rhetoricand philosophy, going back to ancient Greece, as well as more recent cul-tural theories and psychological investigations. And, of course, within eachdiscipline there are different approaches. For example, in psychology re-cent research has examined irony as a figure of thought (Gibbs, 1994);as verbal comprehension (Winner, 1988; Gibbs, 1994; Sperber & Wilson,1995; Kreuz, 2000); as allusion pretense (Kumon-Nakamura, Glucksbergand Brown, 1995); as event knowledge (Lucariello, 1994); as metarepresen-tational reasoning (Lucariello & Mindolovich, 1995); as compromise for-mations (Stringfellow, 1994), and as self-control outcomes (Wegner, 1994).In this study, we draw from some of the ancient concepts, but, primar-ily use 20th-century psychological and cultural approaches to irony. Thisemphasis reflects key aspects of the investigation: the creative thoughtthat went into Shaw’s texts and the interpretation of them in the early 20thcentury as well as today. As background, a few principles, derived fromtoday’s concepts of irony, will be helpful