How Irish Jokes Became American
Humor has a history
Elizabethan plays and joke books printed in London during the 1630s featured the “bull.” As humor historian William Linneman writes, a bull is “a proposition containing a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker.”1 For example, a young Irishman thought that a thermos was the most amazing technology ever invented, “because it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold. How does it know?”
We laugh at the silly person. It feels good to laugh, especially when we laugh along with other people. This time, the person is Irish, but the bull-speaker could be from anywhere, have any background, and the joke would still be funny.
In the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell subdued the Irish and sent all the troublesome ones away to the New World as indentured servants. A few decades later, “the existing bull configuration … was transferred in its entirety to the Irish,” according to historian Brian Earls.2 This process started in joke books during the 1680s and then spread to the British stage in 1703.
The “bulls are consistently (and evidently with some deliberation) woven into the speech of the Irish characters, where they are placed in revealing juxtaposition with the standard speech of the English interlocutors,” Earls writes. In this comedic performance, the English were the “straight man” while the Irish character in the “double act” was the “comic partner” saying the bulls.
This is how the British music hall tradition produced a stereotype so uproarious that people could hear the infectious laughter all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.
The word “bull” is likely French in origin, its original meaning being fraud or deceit. It is the word from which TS Elliot coined the term “bullshit.” This was always the implied spirit of the comic bull trope: someone said some bullshit, and then everyone laughed at the bullshit. Except for the straight man, of course, because his job — per the job title — is to maintain a straight face. Stiff upper lips and all that.
“The tradition thus established pervaded the representation of Irish characters on the eighteenth century stage,” Earls writes. “It carried over into the nineteenth century on the English, Irish, and North American stage, in the works of Dion Boucicault and others, as the bull-uttering comic servants and adventurers of the previous centiury were replaced by bull uttering peasants.”
Ireland, and stereotypes associated with the Irish, were incorporated into an Atlantic literary comic world before the United States of America became a country.
There were of course complaints about representation. “Although writers from Irish and Anglo-Irish backgrounds made a significant contribution to the stereotype, and there is evidence that it was popular with domestic audiences, Irish commentators tended to resent the resultant caricature which was perceived as a misrepresentation of English origin,” Earls writes.
However, as R.L. Edgeworth explained in the first English language essay on the so-called Irish bull, creatively titled “Essay on Irish Bulls,” in 1802, examples of the comic trope originate all over the world, including Ireland. Local circumstances lead to revised and repurposed jokes.
For example, the bull I used in the opening — an Irishman exclaiming that a thermos is the most amazing technology ever invented, “because it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold. How does it know?” — is almost as old as the thermos. It was used by computer programmers in the 1980s. We also find a version of this joke in a book of Alabama-Auburn jokes, for example.3
Auburn student: I think the most amazing thing in the world is the thermos, because it keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.
Bama student: Well, what’s so amazing about that?
Auburn student: How do it know?
The Alabama-Auburn college football rivalry began in the early 20th century. It has nothing obvious in common with jokes the Irish tell about one another. Yet here are just a few examples of the many jokes that appear in both the Auburn-Alabama joke book as well as the Bumper Book of Kerryman Jokes.4
A terrible fire at the University of Alabama burned the library completely to the ground. Both coloring books were destroyed.
And:
Have you heard about the Kerryman whose library was burned down? Both books were destroyed and one of them hadn’t even been colored in.
Did you hear about the Auburn boys who tried to blow up the Alabama bus? They burned their mouths on the exhaust pipe.
And:
Have you heard about the Kerryman who tried to blow up a bus? He burned his lips on the exhaust pipe.
Did you hear about the Alabama students who hijacked a submarine? They demanded one milion dollars and three parachutes.
And:
Have you heard about the Kerryman who hijacked a submarine? He demanded a million euro ransom and a parachute.
How do you define gross stupidity? 144 Alabama students.
And:
What is gross ignorance? 144 Corkmen.
Did you hear about the Alabama student who thought bacteria was the rear entrance to a cafe?
And:
Have you heard about the Kerryman who thought bacteria was the rear entrance to a café?
The University of Alabama football team no longer has any ice water. The player with the recipe graduated.
And:
Why do you never get ice in your drink in Kerry? The fellow with the recipe emigrated.
An Auburn housewife was crying at the kitchen sink when her husband walked in.
“What’s the matter dear?” He asked.
“I was washing the ice cubes with hot water and now I can’t find them.”
And:
Why did the Kerryman lose his job as a barman? He rinsed the ice-cubes in hot water and spent half an hour looking for them afterwards.
A small Alabama town purchased a new fire truck. The next time the councilmen met they discussed how to dispose of the old one. The Crimson Tide councilman suggested they keep it and use it for false alarms.
And:
What are old Kerry fire engines used for? False alarms.
The lawyer, who was a graduate of Alabama was irate. “Do you know the penalty for perjury?” he shouted at the witness. “A few minutes ago you told this court that you have only one brother. Now your sister swears that you have two brothers. Let’s have the truth!”
And:
Why was the Kerryman confused? He couldn’t understand how he only had three brothers while his sister had four.
By dint of long tradition, people from the county of Kerry are framed as the rednecks of Ireland, the Irish that other Irish people are supposed to look down upon. Auburn and Alabama have similarly punched down on one another for generations. Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant used to refer to Auburn as “that cow college,” for example. And there are jokes about other Irish people in the Bumper Book of Kerryman Jokes, too.
None of this is consistent with the 21st century ethos of “not punching down” in comedy. On the contrary, comedians have been “punching down” since Aristophanes’s first show run at the Theatre of Dionysius. Mockery is as necessary to getting along together as any other social interaction.
Without all the jokes about the Irish, and by the Irish about each other, the Irish might never have become Americans.
Listed above are ten examples that I found in two joke books separated by an ocean and a college sports culture. They point to a common body of Atlantic humor that existed in print before the phonograph, radio, or TV, and before the black or Jewish comedians of the 20th century club scene.
As Earls explains in his essay, during the 19th century, the humor of most Irish bulls resided in a dissonance between the new, still-standardizing English language and the various dialects of Irish people who were mostly still illiterate and transmitting their culture orally. Similarly, some bulls “were noted as having been uttered by English country people or the lower classes in the towns.” Making fun of yokels is universal.
Victorians actually seem to have regarded bulls as a form of education. Published in 1989, The Book of Bulls, Irish and Other by G.R. Neilson wrote that “in adition to the amusement which is caused, the reading of good collection of bulls” tends to “encourage clearness of thought and style, and correctness of speech and writing.”
In the early 19th century, “the Irish were the immigrants with the most definite stereotype,” Earls writes. Stereotypical Irish men had “a derby hat and a dudeen pipe, a belligerent attitude, and a love of whiskey.”
“Thus, when the first American humor periodicals began in the 1830s, the stereotype was ready for them, and the comic Irishman became one of the staples of American comedy.”
He was caricatured as a hirsute, muscular laborer, with cheek whiskers, a broad upper lip, a button nose, and prognathous jaws. Sometimes the features were distorted to give a simian aspect.
[…]
The Irish of the comic papers lived in a shanty: the chimney was a jointed stove-pipe that might lean in any direction. In New York, Shanty-town was located on the cliffs of Coogan’s Bluff, and the Irish were pictured climbing ladders to get to their houses. The typical Irishman had several children and a termagant wife who took in washing. Houlihan dreamt that he had died and was admitted directly to heaven: Saint Peter told him that the time he had spend with Mrs. Houliahn was purgatory enough.
Irish cooks and servants were demanding and domineering. Irish workers were unruly. Irish politicians were corrupt. Irish hatred of England brought foreign disputes to America. Though there was substance to some of these stereotypes, they were increasingly seen as stereotypes after the American Civil War.
“These twisted drawings began to disappear somewhat toward the end of the century,” Earls explains. A prominent magazine “mentioned that where it had been once the fashion to malign the Irish, they became better thought of after Americans experienced other types of foreigners.”
Modernity was arriving fast. The pace of change had quickened in the 19th century, for now many more people were literate; mass culture had arrived. Many of the bulls Earls has found in the archives show Irish people with struggles that would have been familiar to most people living in the bourgeoning shopkeeper culture of America in the 1890s. They had become sitcom characters:
Mike had no faith in life insurance: his brother had put hundreds of dollars in a policy and died anyway. All the company did was to give the widow two thousand dollars to run through with her next husband.
And:
When Pat was told that his boss was going to buy him an automobile truck to drive instead of a team, he decided he would have to subscribe to the Scientific American to learn how to swear at the thing.
And:
When Mike told Pat about the millionaire that had lost $2,000,000, Pat replied that it was better to have happened to the millionaire than to some poor man who could not afford it.
Even as negative stereotypes receded, however, the Irish accents remained. “A priest admonished another widow for being miserly and told her she should lay up treasures in heaven. ‘Och, where I'd niver see thim agin?’” Earls records.
Bridget, a popular character in the 1850s, asked prospective employers: “How many avenings can I have out o’the wake fer coortin’? Does the masther belong to the Laigue of Deliverance? Have ye anny objections to me pore old mither and me husband’s lame nevvy slapin’ in the kitchen?”
It was half the fun of Irish comic tropes, and now the Irish-Americans began to perfect their own comic brogue in English print.
Finley Peter Dunne was a Chicagoan who could write, turning from a newspaper office hand into a police reporter while he was a young man.
As a sportswriter, he coined the term “southpaw” for a left-handed pitcher. He covered presidential nominating conventions. Dunne had a considerable impact on the shape of American journalism — and newspaper writing sharpened his wit to a fine point. Bulls were pithy, and therefore perfect for his style.
Literary historian John O. Rees praises “Dunne’s extraordinary virtuosity in the medium” of written Irish-accented English.5 Dunne told an interviewer in 1899 that “his sole object was to give a faithful impression of the dialect spoken in communities like Bridgeport, the outlying settlement where most of Chicago's Irish under-class lived and worked,” Rees writes.
In Bridgeport, he told his readers, one could hear “all the various accents of Ireland, from the awkward brogue of the 'far-downer' to the mild and aisy Elizabethan English of the southern Irishman, and all the exquisite variations to be heard between Armagh and Bantry Bay, with the difference that would naturally arise from substituting cinders and sulphuretted hydrogen for soft misty air and peat smoke.”
It was mythmaking. “In fact Dunne had picked up his brogue expertise not in Bridgeport but at home as a boy, in the small, prosperous Irish neighborhood on the west Side where his parents immigrants from Kilkenny and Queens County, had settled before the Civil war,” Rees reveals.
Whereas at first Dunne “risked only a few departures in orthography and punctuation from ordinary conversational English,” he “was mindful of the excesses that most local colorists of the day were committing with dialect, as they mistakenly strove for slavish phonetic accuracy.” He criticized writers who made their work unreadable.
During a series of humorous fictional sketches based on the travails of a local politician, “many more contractions” began to appear in the dialogue of his characters. Dunne “never strove for anything resembling absolute authenticity with his brogue, even in its final form,” Rees writes in 1989, for he wanted his readers to be able to read it.
Not unlike his friend Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, Dunne managed to suggest the vernacular, with adroit simplification and stylization: he highlighted only a few repeated, striking features, including "iv" for "of," "thr" for "tr," "a" and "r" phonemes lengthened by hyphenation, and occasional carryovers from the mother tongue ("soggarth," "omadhon," "gossoon").
A new reader of Dunne’s style “soon comes to terms with its novel sound patterns and punctuation, and finds that the consistently clear syntax and idiomatic logic make for piquant but quite acceptably easy reading,” Rees says.
“Ye know what orig-inal sin is, Hinnissy,” the titular Mr. Dooley explains in Dunne’s “Mr Dooley’s Philosophy.”
Ye was bor-rn with wan an' I was bor-rn with wan an' ivrybody was bor-rn with wan. 'Twas took out iv me be Father Tuomy with holy wather first an' be me father aftherward with a sthrap. But I niver cud find out what it was. Th' sins I've committed since, I'm sure iv. They're painted red an' carry a bell an' whin I'm awake in bed they stan' out on th' wall like th' ilicthric signs they have down be State sthreet in front iv th' clothin' stores. But I'll go to th' grave without knowin' exactly what th' black orig-inal sin was I committed. All I know is I done wrong.
The original sin of the Irish was to be in the way of the English. By the dawn of the 20th century, the stereotypical sins of the Irish had transformed into all-American jokes. We are still telling some of them to one other, about each other, in Alabama.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
The Crazy Guy Who Invented History
Ideas have histories. All of history is fundamentally a history of ideas. Sometimes the ideas come from strange places at the margins of mental health. It is February 27, 1916. Far away from Verdun, where a series of five attempted assaults to retake Fort Douaumont from the Germans fail at great cost in French life — far away from the English…
Linneman, William R. “Immigrant Stereotypes: 1880-1900.” Studies in American Humor, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 1974), pp. 28-39.
Earls, Brian. “Bulls, Blunders and Bloothers: An Examination of the Irish Bull.” Béaloideas, Iml. 56 (1988), pp. 1-92.
Walton, Sally and Wilkinson, Faye. Alabama-Auburn/Auburn-Alabama Jokes. Quail Ridge Press, 1981.
MacHale, Des. Bumper Book of Kerryman Jokes. Mercier Press, 2005.
Rees, John O. “An Anatomy of Mr. Dooley's Brogue.” Studies in American Humor, New Series 2, Vol. 5, No. 2/3 (Summer, Fall 1986), pp. 145-157.