On the eve of our ninth wedding anniversary, I was woken by the sound of my husband texting furiously on his phone. Someone we knew had posted a joke about Irish people in a WhatsApp group. I am Irish, my husband is English. He doesn’t engage much with social media so I felt sure there must be a misunderstanding.
He passed me the phone and I read the joke. It wasn’t that bad. There was no balaclava or gelignite, no allusions to terrorism, no red-faced drunken leprechauns. But the butt of the joke, like all the others of its kind, was that the Irish are thick. My heart sank.
My husband wanted to message the person directly and tell them to delete it. No one else had posted a response. Maybe they’d read it. Maybe they hadn’t. I asked him not to do anything. At least, not just yet.
Before I came to the UK as a student in the late eighties, I hadn’t realised that anyone considered Irish people to be of inferior intelligence. That time was, it has to be said, not a heyday for Anglo-Irish relations.
It was four years after the IRA’s attack on the Conservative party conference in Brighton, and less than a decade since 10 Republican prisoners had died on hunger strike in the Maze prison in Belfast. The Birmingham Six and Guildford Four were still in prison for terror attacks they didn’t commit.
My father waved me off with stories from his own student days in the sixties of bottling beer in an Enfield brewery and boarding house signs saying “no dogs, no blacks, no Irish”.
On my degree course, there was some shock at the strength of my accent, but there were also Irish lecturers and fascination with Irish culture. A well-meaning college friend gave me a postcard of the comedian Bernard Manning telling a joke about “this thick Paddy”. Behind him were the names of the Irish Nobel laureates WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. I knew I was being given the postcard out of a sense of solidarity but I didn’t really feel I needed it.
I’d never heard of Manning (“Irish fella went for a job on a building site. They said: ‘What’s your name?’ He said: ‘Paddy Mulligan.’ They asked: ‘How do you spell it?’ He said: ‘Stick the job up your arse.’”). And I wasn’t aware that many British people had grown up with Irish jokes, a tradition that dated back to satirical magazines such as Punch in the 1840s. I’d learnt in school that we were the land of saints and scholars. I might have questioned the sainthood but I never questioned the intelligence.
If anything, I arrived in the UK at the tail-end of the Irish joke. Manning had given way to the campaigning humour of Ben Elton and, before long, it was the time of Father Ted, the satirical comedy about three priests living on the fictional Craggy Island. I remember British friends of Irish descent being initially unsure of what to make of it, sensing another Irish joke was being played on them. But it wasn’t that, it was clever and fresh, completely Irish and brimming with that wonderful self-confidence that allows for self-deprecation. Whereas Irish jokes belittled, Father Ted made fun of something I recognised. “One thing I’m really proud of,” co-writer Graham Linehan told the Guardian in 2015, “is that Ted replaced the old, hackneyed Irish joke with Irish humour, which is a very different thing.”
The mid-nineties arrival of Father Ted was three years before the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to the Troubles, the three decades and more of violence in which thousands died. The Irish economy was booming and suddenly it seemed there was a whole generation who had never heard an Irish joke or been aware of an IRA terror campaign. Those attitudes belonged to the seventies and eighties, to people who talked about papists and the Free State, said “begob” and “begorrah” and mimicked Irish accents. These people may still exist, but they are very few.
So it was a shock to read the joke on the WhatsApp group and I was unsure of what to do.
We live in multicultural suburban London and belong to several local message groups for kids’ birthday parties, swimming groups, sports activities, neighbourhood meetings and school. We know these people, we also don’t know them. I suddenly felt that maybe I’d stumbled on something very English, and received a clear sign that I was in the wrong place. The person who had posted the joke knew I was Irish; they seemed perfectly nice. But was this what people really thought? What did they think I was going to do when they posted the joke? Or had they not thought at all? How was I supposed to react now?
There’s no playbook for what to do when faced with this kind of situation, says Alex Czopp, a professor of psychology who has published research on what happens when people speak up about prejudice. “Confrontations are awkward, you are implying . . . that someone has a bias that the vast majority of us are appalled by, some people respond very negatively.” The person might only be dimly aware of my Irishness but if I brought this up then that would be all they would see.
Also, he adds: “Humour is almost inherently ambiguous, it’s not meant to be taken seriously.” In fact, I anticipated that if I brought it up, I might be told about distant Irish relatives or friends, all of whom had a much better sense of humour than me and none of whom would have remotely had a problem with this. Very quickly, the problem would be seen as mine.
This can be the case, Czopp says, if the offence is seen as marginal, for example, bias faced by the wealthy or privileged or prejudice by women against men. It “doesn’t fit the prototype of how prejudice is supposed to look, it feels a less egregious offence,” he says. Maybe, I thought, the person who posted the WhatsApp joke operated, like many people, a hierarchy of offence and simply thought Irish jokes didn’t count.
People who complain about a positive stereotype, such as the “caring” female, can also be given short shrift, adds Czopp. In fact, those most likely to get a sympathetic hearing, at least from bystanders, are those who speak up for other people, for example, white people who speak out against racism or men who speak up for women.
It’s little surprise that fewer of these conversations take place face to face. Online, more people are willing to speak out. “If you can do it behind your avatar in the comments section of an article, it changes the cost-benefit analysis,” says Czopp, but often that just “fans flames of outrage on both sides, you’re a terrible person for having said it, you’re a terrible person for being offended by it”.
This was the last thing I wanted. I know that in the grand scheme of things, in a world full of prejudice and protests and dreadful abuse, where black people are killed by the police, the fact that I don’t like a joke about “thick Paddies” is a minor matter.
I know many people repeat jokes or phrases they’ve heard without immediately understanding the implication. Put on the defensive, they can then dig in. Everything becomes worse. I thought of the Father Ted episode, where he ties himself into contortions over racism. “I wouldn’t have done a Chinaman impression if I’d known there was going to be a Chinaman there to see me doing a Chinaman impression,” he tells Father Dougal.
Ultimately, however, I knew there was a cost to inaction. I have sat red-faced and awkward through too many similar encounters. Whether the joke is about Irish people or an offensive comment or slur about another race or group, you lose your sense of integrity if you don’t speak up.
And what if they made a joke about Irish people in front of my children, who could absorb this idea that Irish people were stupid, repeat the joke to their cousins and have their asses kicked at the next family party?
According to Czopp, it could be in the offenders’ best interests to have this pointed out to them, even if it doesn’t go down too well at first. “There is considerable research suggesting we can have an effect on behaviour, privately and publicly,” he says. “We might not see it happening, those downstream consequences might occur out of our sight, we [may] get initial negativity, but we might have had an impact.”
I slept badly that night and woke up before 6am. I had left the group but could still read the joke. I was hesitant. Stop overthinking it, my husband said. If anything, he was more upset than me. If someone says something racist, call them out, he said. Immediately, and not in a few weeks when you’ve finally figured out what you think about it or where it fits on some arbitrary scale of historical offence. As Father Ted would say: “Down with this sort of thing.”
It needed to be dealt with. But was it really my job to explain to someone why this joke was offensive? If I say something, I said, they’ll think I’m humourless and have a chip on my shoulder. It’s easier for you because you’re not Irish. You married an Irish woman, I joked, this was the deal. You brought it to my attention, you do it.
So that morning, he met the person who ran the group. They hadn’t seen the joke and were horrified when they did. They spoke to the person who’d posted it, who was embarrassed and apologetic and swore off social media. They tried to delete the message but succeeded in only deleting it for themselves, so it is still there. Resting in the WhatsApp account, to use one final Father Ted joke.
I still don’t know why they posted it, or even if they understood what they were doing when they sent it. I’m not sure I want to know. A few months on, I’m embarrassed I got my husband to fight my battles for me. It would have been better if I’d done it myself. There is, after all, nothing wrong with standing up for yourself.
Orla Ryan is the FT’s Middle East and Africa news editor
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The Link LonkJuly 10, 2020 at 05:00PM
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Have you heard the one about the offensive joke? - Financial Times
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