Irony has been classically related to pretending. Clark and Gerrig develop this idea in their Pretense theory of ironic communication. According to this account, a speaker, when being ironic, pretends to be an injudicious speaker speaking to an ignorant audience, and meanwhile expresses a hostile or derogatory attitude towards what she pretends. The hearer who understands the irony will recognize the pretense, the pretended speaker's injudiciousness, the pretended audience's ignorance, and the derogatory attitude. With this take on the issue, Clark and Gerrig link the notion of irony to traditionally related ideas as mimicking, making believe or acting. In this chapter I analyze this theory and explain its strengths and weaknesses. I also focus on explaining the differences between the echoic and pretense accounts of irony. Furthermore, I present three authors that propose different theoretical versions of a pretense based account of irony: Currie, Recanati and Walton. The three of them claim that ironic speakers pretend, but the idea of pretense is formulated differently. To finish with, I present a hybrid account which includes both echo and pretense: Kumon-Nakamura, Glucksberg and Brown's Allusional Pretense theory of irony.