Irony is powerful in creating a satisfying story. I came across this idea of the “ironic skill” of the hero and it’s a fantastic concept to play with.
In the film “Get Out,” Chris (Daniel Kaluuya, pictured above) ends up two-thirds of the way into the movie strapped to a chair, outdone by a villain who has been way ahead of him the entire movie. Chris is helpless and the villains need only ding a spoon on a teacup to turn him to jelly.
So Chris does a very ironic thing: He plucks cotton from his chair armrests and plugs his ears. (As Jordan Peele points out in his commentary, this black man picks some cotton to avoid slavery.) Assuming that Chris will be unconscious, Jeremy frees him to take him to surgery, but Chris springs to life and knocks out Jeremy with a bocce ball.
This special skill is introduced early: When Chris is being hypnotized, he flashes back to when he was a child, watching TV, correctly fearing his mom had been in an accident. We see that he was betraying his anxiety in only one way: He was obsessively scratching at the armrest of the chair he was sitting on. As he’s being hypnotized by Missy, he starts to do the same thing. When he’s in the basement, hypnotized off and on for days, Chris naturally repeats this anxious tic, until he’s ripped open the leather and exposed the cotton.
Now, most people would not call picking at the arm of a chair a “special skill.” That is why it’s so ironic. The method a character uses to get out of trouble at a moment of climactic danger is, ideally, something that was established previously … but not actually registered by the audience as a useful skill.