Q: How do you confuse an Irishman? A: Put him in front of two
shovels and ask him to take his pick Q: How do you get an Irishman on
the roof? A: Tell him drinks are on the house. Q: Why did the Irishman
fall out the window? A: He was trying to iron his curtains.

Ah yes, the Irish joke, beloved of northern English comedians in the
1970s, but driven underground by killjoys and lefties in the 80s and
90s, along with jokes about Blacks, “Pakis” and Jews. Or so we thought.

It would appear that jokes about stupid and drunken Irishmen live on
in Australia and not just in underground clubs in Hicksville, but at the
highest political level.

In a recent speech to his Liberal Party colleagues the leader of the Australian Federal opposition, Tony Abbott, brought the house down with
the quip, “This government’s a bit like the Irishman who lost ten pounds
betting on the Grand National and then lost 20 pounds on the action
replay.”

Funny and harmless? Or toxic and offensive? Or maybe just ill-judged
and antediluvian? It certainly seems out of place and anomalous.

It would be hard to imagine a senior politician in America or UK
playing around with ethnic jokes. The equivalent might be Sarah Palin
comparing the Democrats to stupid Polacks – pretty unimaginable now,
even for her. Nor would a senior Irish politician quip about “Kerrymen”.
(Kerry was the county in Ireland, which when I was child in Dublin, was
the butt of our jokes.)

I remember being struck shortly after I moved to Sydney last year
(from London) when I encountered golliwogs for sale at the airport. This
would be a pretty rare sight these days in the UK. But you would expect
Britain to have a more sensitive attitude to the depiction of
Afro-Caribbeans, just as Australia will be more alert to stereotypes and
slurs on people from the Far East.

However you might feel about “political correctness gone mad”, who
can regret that the political culture in Birmingham would no longer
allow the British Conservative party to run its 1964 anti-immigrant election slogan – “Want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour”?

Much derided ‘PC" has succeeded in making us more mannerly and polite
to each other, old-fashioned virtues, of which one would expect
conservative politicians to approve.

Nonetheless, one needs to be careful about being too puritanical
about comedy. It does not lend itself to hard and fast principles, not
least because it relishes transgression, puncturing social taboos and
hypocrisies.

The thrill of misbehaving that we relished as children finds its
adult equivalent in saying forbidden things. The laugh often comes from
the “I can’t believe he just said that” feeling.

One can forgive a lot if a joke is funny, but what makes it funny is
deeply context-dependent – who is telling the joke and who is listening.
Jewish jokes delivered by Woody Allen or Larry David might not work
coming from someone else. Would Abbott have told an anti-Jew joke in a
speech? His Irish joke seemed blithe rather than daring, anachronistic
rather than transgressive – an English import that has disappeared from
England.

The Irish joke, and its antecendet the Irish bull has a long history. In “An Essay on Irish Bulls”
(1802), the Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth wrote of a laughter of
thick-skinned superiority: “the ignorant, happily unconscious that they
know nothing, can be checked in their merriment by no consideration,
human or divine. Theirs is the sly sneer, the dry joke, and the horse
laugh.”

Ronan McDonald is the director of the John
Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at University of New South Wales, in
Sydney. This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.