I believe the term for that is "irony"

Over 30K people signed up for an email based mailing list to hear more about the Monty Python musical "Spamalot" (and other shows as well). But a security hole in the setup made all of those addresses visible to the public.

hen told by e-mail message about the breach, several people who had signed up for the "Spamalot" list said they were unsurprised, given the state of Internet security and the aggressiveness of spammers. Several noted that there was something appropriately Pythonesque about the incident. After all, Internet historians say that the use of the word spam to refer to junk e-mail messages has its roots in a 1970 Monty Python sketch, in which all conversation in a cafe is drowned out by a group of Vikings chanting the word over and over. The sketch and its song about Spam, the meat product, were adapted for the new musical.

"Are you sure they didn't do it on purpose?" joked one list subscriber, Matthew J. H. Baya of Ellsworth, Me. "Talk about guerrilla marketing."

Posted by Eric at March 12, 2005 11:19 AM | TrackBack