The articles in this issue of Metaphor and Symbol address the topic of verbal irony from 3 perspectives: adult comprehension and production, child comprehension, and neuropsychological underpinnings. These approaches are complementary and hold the promise of providing converging evidence for testing theories of verbal irony. A discourse goals and heuristics approach to irony production and processing has the potential to explain why ironic statements are used, how they are interpreted, and why they are sometimes misunderstood.