While that comment sounds like amusing irony, it is in reality a dangerous assumption based on very little (if any) actual experience with people who have had the offensive term used to describe them.

Steiner considered the phrase "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" from The Godfather, which may initially seem to present an amusing irony precisely because watchers are able to recognise that the character is making a threat, not an offer.

It was one of the less amusing ironies of my new life in the Uncleared.

Then he laughed again, struck by the amusing irony that the mindless creature had taught him a trick, rather than the other way around.

In the Soviet style, the Timurovites were equipped with their own song, which today carries an amusing irony: Do you see the parade of characters, Who left the pages and became heroes?

What an amusing irony, thought Sisko, to detect a ship because of its cloak.

Ord lived two years into the reign of Callistus IV, but then, it was common knowledge that life positively abounded with amusing ironies.

On the green, Corey Pavin also was awaiting a ruling, and in one of the more amusing ironies of the day, Faldo actually hit his shot - after a wait of some 14 minutes - before Pavin had cleared the green.

It's one of contemporary pop music's more amusing ironies that Robert Plant appears to be jumping on the bandwagon a big late.

Rock-and-Roll CEOs There is an amusing irony in the fact that so many of our captains of industry pay cool hunters good money to lead them on the path to brand-image nirvana.