How Irish Jokes Became American

Humor has a history

Finley Peter Dunne in 1903

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, “beca…