He gets his laughs, but Tony's self-irony has been replaced by the star's self-comment, and it doesn't help that the writing often depends on glib banter, the most conspicuous example of which is an extended set piece in small-town Tennessee.
He shows us just how far the contemporary usage of irony diverges from an older, far more appealing meaning, according to which irony is a portal to self-knowledge.
Irony today is thus a mixture of self-detachment and self-absorption: an unwillingness to take a stand and an eagerness to see the strange workings of fate in mere thwarted desire.