We’re dealing a lot with stereotypes in this post.
As some of you may have surmised, my surname is Irish. I can only claim to be half-Hibernian, however, as my mother was a daughter of Israel. So what does it amount to then, this demi-Irishness of mine? Please don’t think that I’m one of your professional Irish-Americans. Any such sentimental silliness on my part got knocked out of me long ago, thank you. As Jimmy Cagney remarks in The Fighting 69th, “You Irish? Yeah, me too, but I don’t work at it like some flannelheads.” Or to put it another way, as G. Bernard Shaw, the wittiest Irishmen in history (thus making him the wittiest person in all of human existence), once said, “If you want to bore an Irishman, play him a sentimental Irish tune. Or introduce him to another Irishman.”
All of this is by way of leading into a rumination on Irish humor. Since many tend to think at the most superficial, banal level of stereotype when the topic is brought up, most people bring up the usual tired old chestnuts, usually something involving alcohol and a saloon of some sort like the weary, stale yarn about the fellow having three shots of Jameson’s, one for himself and two for his brothers still in the Old Sod, et cetera, et cetera. The problem with most of this sentimental blarney (other than the salient fact that it isn’t funny) is that it really has very little to do with Ireland, its history, or the way that history is reflected in Irish humor. (I actually know two very funny Irish jokes, but I don’t dare repeat them because they really are vile.)
I examine this subject because of my own personal interest in Irish literature (I find it fascinating that such a historically remote, undeveloped place could produce so many incredible writers, much like Czarist Russia) and also because of the light it seems to shed on my own distinctly peculiar idea of what’s amusing. I will confess that I have a tendency to often laugh at things many other people find appalling. I know damned well that I shouldn’t, that it’s neither helpful nor kind to go rolling around on the floor periodically upon the receipt of dismal tidings, but it’s just the way I’m made apparently. That may be why so many Irish writers appeal to me. There is a distinctive mode of Irish humor, discernible in writers from Swift down to the modern day, a way of looking at the human condition in a dispassionate and disinterested way as a series of appalling circumstances and misadventures that merits only mild concern and faint sympathy at most. Is this merely a means of coping with the awful weight of Irish history, black humor in the face of a chronicle of the most awful disasters, plagues, famines, invasions, rebellions and their brutal suppression or is it something just inherent in the Keltic soul, an inborn disposition to find laughter in sorrow, an inevitable outcome of life in a poor land perpetually enmired in soggy misery? Or as Charles Pierce’s grandmother used to put it, “And who’s he when he’s at home?”
Two fine examples of this tendency are Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth and Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. The first novel was published originally in Gaelic in 1941 and so is comparatively modern, while the second was published in 1800 and can be considered an early example of the English novel. O’Brien (real name Brian O’Nolan) is perhaps best known for At Swim Two Birds, famed as one of the best examples of metafiction and the funniest Irish novel that I’ve read to date.
In The Poor Mouth, rather than take on a multitude of subjects as he handled so brilliantly in At Swim, O’Brien satirizes the Gaelic novels of the early 20th century that specialized in depicting Irish peasants in the depths of the most miserable, unhealthy, boggy, rural existence imaginable. His protagonist, the nobly named Bonaparte O’Coonassa, dwells among pigs and sheep in the worst poverty in the beautiful, but unlivable town of Corkodoragha. No misery is spared him, from the humiliation of being shamed in school and the town for only speaking Gaelic, to losing his wife and tiny, young son, carried off by disease on the same day, to being sent to prison for the rest of his life for a crime he didn’t commit. And if you just take the trouble to sit yourself down with a good pint of something with both your hooves shoved toward the fire, what a merry romp you’ll find the whole thing to be.
Things don’t appear much jollier at Castle Rackrent at first glance either. This very short work give an account of three generations of Anglo-Irish landowners, each more short sighted and self destructive than the one that preceded him. The first two make efforts to preserve and increase the family fortune through such means as constantly dunning tenants for rents and feudal duties (hence the name of the estate, to “rack” or wring out the rent) or by constant litigation or the threat thereof. All this work goes to naught when the third heir, Sir Condy, completely wastes the estate through his own genial incompetence. While the most agreeable and pleasant of the three, Sir Condy is also the weakest and most dissipated. He comes to a horrible, drunken end, fully conscious of his ruin and the fact that he brought it about himself. All of this is narrated by his faithful retainer, Thady Quirk, who tearfully recounts the dismal downfall of his feudal lords in the most pathetic terms while all the while leaving you to wonder if he means devil a word of what he says and is really just about pulling your leg.
When reduced to their bare bones, both tales seemed to be composed of the essence of tragedy, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. This is because, even though separated by almost a century and a half, they possess the same essential Irish quality, a sprightliness and energy that carries both narratives along at a relentless pace along with a lively eye for the absurd in any situation. Both O’Brien and Edgeworth had keen ears for Irish patterns of speech. Although an Englishwoman, Edgeworth was raised in Ireland and had a tremendous feel for the Irish viewpoint of her time. The humor of her tale is especially poignant in light of the fact that it was written soon after the terrible Rebellion of 1798, one of the most internecine of Irish conflicts.
Both works also share a readiness to find amusement in the most violent events, another particular trait in Irish humor, although not isolated to that country alone (Mark Twain comes to mind in our own). Two passages from the respective works illustrate this point:
The Poor Mouth:
I was feeble for a time about the house, without interest in anything and not paying attention to any one thing more than the other. Suddenly I noticed that the floor of the house was red—black-red in places and brown-red elsewhere. I was amazed at this time and accosted my mother while she was engaged in pig-feeding activities by the fireside.
‘Is it the way, good woman,’ said I, ‘that the end of the world and the termination of the universe is with us at long last and that there are red showers down on top of us in the dead of the night?’
‘No and it’s not that way, ugly little treasure!’ said she, ‘but the Old-Grey-Fellow is spouting blood here all morning.’
‘I believe that it was out of his nose that this fountain of blood was belching?’ said I.
‘No and it’s not that way, little kisser!’ said she, ‘but deadly unhealable wounds that he has got in his two feet. He had a competition here this morning with Martin O’Bannassa to see who’d lift a big piece of a rock. Poor Martin was beaten, God save the hearers! because he couldn’t move the rock. The Old Fellow was lucky as he always is. He managed to lift the rock as high as his waist and he won whatever stake that they had between them.’
‘He was always strong!’ said I.
‘But then, because of the amount of the weight, the stone fell from his hands and fell misfortunately on his two feet so that they burst and every bone and bonelet was broken, I fear…
‘I never thought,’ said I, ‘that the Old Fellow had that much blood.’
‘If he had,’ said she, ‘he doesn’t have it now!’
Castle Rackrent
‘The jaunting—car it was that ran away with her,’ says Judy. ‘I was coming home that same time from Biddy M’Guggin’s marriage, and a great crowd of people too upon the road, coming from the fair of Crookaghnawaturgh, and I sees a jaunting—car standing in the middle of the road, and with the two wheels off and all tattered. “What’s this?” says I. “Didn’t ye hear of it?” says they that were looking on; “it’s my Lady Rackrent’s car, that was running away from her husband, and the horse took fright at a carrion that lay across the road, and so ran away with the jaunting—car, and my Lady Rackrent and her maid screaming, and the horse ran with them against a car that was coming from the fair with the boy asleep on it, and the lady’s petticoat hanging out of the jaunting—car caught, and she was dragged I can’t tell you how far upon the road, and it all broken up with the stones just going to be pounded, and one of the road—makers, with his sledge—hammer in his hand, stops the horse at the last; but my Lady Rackrent was all kilt and smashed,” and they lifted her into a cabin hard by, and the maid was found after where she had been thrown in the gripe of a ditch, her cap and bonnet all full of bog water, and they say my lady can’t live anyway. Thady, pray now is it true what I’m told for sartain, that Sir Condy has made over all to your son Jason?’
I find all of this very amusing. If you don’t, you could say that you need the full context to get the joke or that slapstick violence isn’t your cup of tea and also that humor, like other matters of taste, isn’t to be disputed. I’ll just say if you don’t think this is funny, you just lack an Irish sense of humor. Whether that be a blessing or a curse, I’ll leave it to the reader to determine. To those who do think this sort of thing droll, I highly recommend both The Poor Mouth and Castle Rackrent.