Sure, it’s only a bit of “craic”, as they say in Ireland. The Irish have a great sense of humour, so they say, and enjoy having the craic, having verbal fun with plenty of banter. Another term used in my home country is “slagging” and you need to learn to take it and give it, otherwise it will be a one way street.
As children of 1960s Ireland, we were often beaten and bullied. Things in Ireland hadn’t changed much in the previous decades but major societal shifts were about to unfold. I learnt the old adage, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt (break) me. To survive, one developed a “thick skin.” Ah! childhood, wandering off during those long school holidays, miles from home, to return for evening dinner. But those wanders, down by the river, or across town to Strabane Glen, were fraught with the possibility of meeting a gang of youths from another section of town, and not just to be chased, or sworn at, but a great possibility of being beaten, as happened to me a few times. No such thing as the good old days.
Irish humour, “a wicked sense of humour”, the craic, most likely evolved out of that powerless feeling from being colonised. So what could the powerless Irish do? When doing family research at Strokestown House, Co. Rosscommon, before it became the The Famine Museum, I came across a court case called the Ballykilcline Rising, where the tenants won against evictions in 1844 but unfortunately their win was overturned two years later. Ballykilcline were a hidden people, they had a culture and qualities despite the subjugation of colonialisation that failed to wipe out. They used “throughotherness”, which attempted to frustrate the law/landlord by evasions, dodges, fluid identities, and of course using humour. A more aggressive position against colonisation was taken by the Whiteboys, an agrarian violent group that defended tenant farmers. We see an emergence of the colonial mindset in English nationalism today and the consequences of that could result in the breakup of the nation they claim to revere.
How did we, in Northern Ireland survive the mayhem and horror of the Troubles? Seamus Heaney suggested many escaped to their front rooms. Northern Irish people often heard of the circumstances of a bomb that rattled their living room windows on the news from London or Dublin. To survive the calamities of previous centuries the powerless Irish developed their own wicked sense of humour, black, as seen in the 1920s Dublin’s Sean O’Casey plays to the contemporary TV comedy, Derry Girls.
James Joyce’s Ulysses could be described as subversive, his humour as black as it can be, as was the works of Flann O’Brien, the pen name of Brian O’Nolan, my fellow Strabane man. Oscar Wilde’s dry wise cracks are legend. Lisa McGee’s TV comedy, Derry girls, where some of her one liners are hysterically black but often stereotypical too. The banality of stereotype, “put them in a box”, probably can’t be avoided, especially if it gets in the way of a good story. Like all things Northern Irish, we are mindful of who is telling the joke and to whom, it’s similar to the fact, it’s wise to know what street you are walking on, i.e. are you in a loyalist area or a republican area? James Young, a NI comedian seemed to cross the sectarian divide with his catch phrase “Do us a favour. Will yez stop yer fightin’.” Unfortunately, his plea never worked.
The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes, by Philip Adams & Patrice Newell,1994, has a lengthy foreword and a rather earnest analysis of the joke: its bodily and muscular reaction, the benefits of laughter, why a child smiles, and laughing at the Grim Reaper. Adams is a well known broadcaster of the political left. They suggest there is little room for humour in religion because it is all about control. Jokes deal in bigotry, sexism, racism, ageism, and other politically incorrectisms. They can be verbal aggression but mostly an amusing play on words. The essay discusses the jokes about Aborigines, Jews, and of course the “dimwitted” Irish. One cannot deny that repulsive jokes exist. They are funny when it happens to someone else, or somewhere else. Today, self deprecating jokes are more common. The writers maintain all jokes, Irish and Australian are a recycled, global, floating currency, you don’t have to be Irish to get it. They evoke a sense of the tribal, you are either with us or against us. Coincidentally, to prove their point, the writers cite a sex joke about David Hill, former ABC chairman that earned Andrew Denton, a TV presenter and comedian, notoriety, that was originally a joke about Donald Trump, it was a joke about their vanity. Some positive quotes here.
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© Hugh Vaughan 2023