A non-comprehensive list of jokes that are both ubiquitous and unfunny: Britain’s performative dislike of the French; I hate my mother-in-law jokes; Ricky Gervais’s routine of “everyone is too sensitive these days”; anything that invokes bodily function; anything that starts with “knock knock”; “covfefe”; descriptions of Donald Trump as “the orange man”; and, finally, Irish people riffing on “hating” the English.
Given this disposition I remain a somewhat unlikely fan of Saturday Night Live and its writer’s room that groans under the weight of cliché. I find its rhetorical caution, unambitious approach to humour, and careful adherence to social orthodoxies calming. It is a completely unchallenging TV show.
But all of this – the show’s inherent laziness – went too far this weekend with Paul Mescal as its host. Mescal – on his stated mission to correct stereotypes about the Irish – says in his opening monologue: “People also think the Irish hate British people. That’s not true, we just don’t consider them people.”
Are we really still this repetitive Brit-bashing tedium? Could we not retire it as the final victim of 2024? And not for po-faced and solemn reasons about the importance of loving thy neighbour; the need to foster communion not discordance with Britain; nor out of any moral priggishness. But because the joke is boring, intellectually unserious and derivative. If Ireland wants to maintain the self-belief that it is a nation of wisecrackers and comedians then it will need to work a bit harder than this.
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And yet it is fashionable among the least interesting to press on with the routine: those who shout “800 years!” at the mention of the English; those who snigger – it’s never a warm chuckle – at the so-called West Brits; those who trade in “up the ‘Ras’”; and now those who go on SNL to declare that the Irish don’t consider the British to be people. Here we have a long list of second-hand banalities delivered with the air of people who think they are exotic iconoclasts.
But of course they are not iconoclasts. They are peddlers of cliché who have mistaken their cynicism for droll humour. It’s important to remember that once a joke is acceptable to air on SNL – the pinnacle of the normie, liberal establishment – it has been laundered of all its edge. This is a TV show that loves to characterise Trump as “the orange man” still in 2024; that has Kate McKinnon dressed as Hillary Clinton singing an incredibly earnest rendition of Hallelujah after the 2016 election. As comedy goes it is as radical and subversive as a garden-variety children’s book.
But this “isn’t it funny to stick-it-to-the-Brits” disposition is everywhere nonetheless. I am reminded too of Blindboy’s recent documentary. (Blindboy, for those unaware, is an Irish podcaster who proclaims on Irish history while his face is concealed by a plastic shopping bag fashioned into a balaclava of sorts.) In Land of Slavery and Scholars a historian explains to him that, as Blindboy puts it, Ireland “taught the English to write”. As Ed Power wrote in these pages, Blindboy “seems far too performatively chuffed” at this chance to boast cultural superiority. (Journalists of my age tend to say it was Martin Amis or Fintan O’Toole who taught them how to write not the Irish monks who excited Blindboy so much, but that is besides the point.) Over Brexit there was plenty of hand-wringing about British “exceptionalism”. But I cannot help but note that the Irish are hardly amateurs in the field.
Speaking of Amis, he perhaps most famously remarked that cliché was not just “clichés of the pen, but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart”. It is an enormously helpful razor: boring and unoriginal jokes are products of boring and unoriginal thinking. “Ha ha we hate the English” is the rhetorical reflex of a cautious and uncurious mind. Say something new! Try something different! Please!
This lazy thinking can get us into much worse places than bad jokes. Take whatever position you want on the sight of tens of thousands of young people turning up at Electric Picnic to chant “up the ‘Ra” as though the terrorist organisation were mere cuddly folk heroes; and yes who cares that the Irish women’s soccer team sang the same song to mark its victory, as though the gruesome murders committed by the IRA are not a product of living memory. Amis reminds us that “style is morality” and I cannot help but dwell on that idea now.
I do not think treating bloody history as a lighthearted meme demonstrates immense amounts of respect for your country or your ancestors. But enough of my pearl clutching about terrorist anthems! Tawdry and tired gags about hating the English are usually just that. Time to get some new material.
