Verbal irony has been studied in various academic disciplines such as linguistics, pragmatics, communication science and social psychology. However, due to the multidisciplinarity of the respective fields, each of these disciplines has developed its own irony literature. This paper discusses the current state of affairs of research into comprehension and rhetorical effects of verbal irony, with an emphasis on pragmatic aspects of irony. We propose our model of the ironic spectrum based on predictors related to (1) the formulation of the ironic utterance, (2) the co-text of the ironic utterance and (3) the context of the ironic utterance. This model integrates linguistic, pragmatic, communication-scientific and social-psychological evidence on the comprehension and effectiveness of verbal irony.