Ironic speech acts, as Searle and Austin believe, are parasitic since they do infect normal speech acts and, indeed, could be non-ironic speech acts in different contexts. The vehicle of an ironic speech act is a non-ironic speech act. To formulate rules for ironic speech some pertinent conditions they must fulfill will be outlined, then the rules for the use of ironic speech acts will be extracted from those conditions: I thus will follow Searle's procedure in his analysis of the illocutionary act of promising and create a series of constitutive and prescriptive rules governing ironic acts (Searle, 1969:57-71). Just as for non-ironic acts, ironic speech acts have input and output conditions, propositional content conditions, preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, and essential conditions. Irony operates by covertly negating one or more of the conditions and rules underlying most non-ironic speech acts. The illocutionary force of a speech act is retained but rather curiously blunted so that a perlocutionary-like effect is added. This added effect, which blends elements of illocutionary and perlocutionary effects, is what will be termed an affective effect: all ironic speech acts are affective speech acts. It will be argued that illocutionary and perlocutionary effects are more closely linked than Austin and Searle seem to have thought. Language used ironically is superficially deceptive and the deception is intended by the ironist to be detected by his audience: the ironist leaves clues to his ironic intentions. Ironic acts entail at least two propositions instead of the single one found in Searle's analyses of non-ironic acts: ironic acts create multiple layers of meaning by creating opposition, through negation, between the two propositions involved. By necessity, the rules of ironic speech acts will be somewhat more complex and somewhat different than those governing non-ironic acts since two propositions are intimately involved. But ironic uses of languages, like non-ironic uses, are rule-governed and conventions underlying ironic speech acts will be delineated. Initially the analysis will be restricted to short examples of sarcasm and verbal irony so that complexities of ironic situations can be unravelled and displayed