Duel Citizen – Frank McNally on Larry David and the Irish duelling code

In the climactic scene of Fatwa!, the last episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Season 9, Larry David is challenged to a duel by co-star Lin-Manuel Miranda. Happily for comedy, it’s a duel of the paintball variety.

With the good taste for which the series is famous, the two men have been collaborating on a comic musical inspired by David’s experience of being under death sentence from Islamic fundamentalists.

But after a row during a paintball outing for cast and crew, an angry Miranda slaps David and demands “satisfaction”. As they later face off, pistols drawn, the overseer announces solemnly that the challenge will be governed by the rules of the “Code Duello, Irish version”.

Unlike the paintball duel, the Irish Code Duello was a deadly serious thing, once. Drawn up at the Clonmel Summer Assizes of 1777, “by the gentlemen of Tipperary, Galway, Mayo, Sligo, and Roscommon”, it was quickly adopted not just in Ireland but also far beyond.

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Codifying a practice that had become increasingly fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic during the 18th century, it has been described as “the most important and comprehensive duelling document for the English-speaking world”.

Its 26 rules clarified such confusions as whether a first insult between men of honour should take preference over a worse insult given in reply. They also explained when and how apologies might be accepted.

They noted that “any insult to a lady under a gentleman’s care or protection [was] to be considered as by one degree a greater offence than if given to the gentleman personally”.

They ordained that the party challenged could choose weapons, unless the choice was swords and the challenger pleaded genuine incompetence as a swordsman.

Another important rule was that challenges should never be delivered at night, unless the target was likely to quit town before morning, “for it is desirable to avoid all hot-headed proceedings”.

Crucially, the rules also decreed there could be “no dumb firing or firing in the air”. That was mainly to discourage frivolous challenges. But it was also a health and safety issue. Shots aimed at the ground or elsewhere had a bad habit of injuring people.

The movie Barry Lyndon, set more than half a century before the Clonmel code was adapted, illustrates some of the malpractices the 1777 lawyers were trying to stamp out.

First the film’s eponymous hero “kills” his love rival, an English army officer, in a duel. Only when spirited into exile does he learn that his seconds – to preserve the £1,500 a year the officer will bring their family through marriage – had stuffed his musket with a plug of rope rather than a bullet. The officer and marriage both survive.

Then, many years and duels later, an older Lyndon is challenged by another Englishman, his stepson. He spares the young man inevitable death by deliberately missing. But the gesture is not reciprocated, and our anti-hero finishes his duelling days on one leg.

The Irish code was very influential in America in the years after independence, as the use of pistols replaced the messier sword fights of old. As well as being neater, however, pistol fights were also much deadlier.

In 1804, the most notorious example in US history resulted in the demise of Alexander Hamilton, treasury secretary, who was shot by Vice-President Aaron Burr. Hamilton’s son had also died in a duel three years earlier.

Those and similar events gradually forced 19th-century gentlemen in the US and elsewhere to find less dangerous ways to settle their rows.

In the meantime, the Irish Code may have been a factor in one famously non-fatal duel. During a 1856 debate on slavery in the US senate, a southern representative named Preston Brooks brutally assaulted an abolitionist who had just delivered a fiery speech.

The incident made Brooks a hero in the south. But another anti-slavery senator, Anson Burlingame, then delivered a scathing denunciation across the chamber, calling Brooks a coward.

The latter demanded satisfaction in traditional style. That meant conceding choice of weapons. When Burlingame said “rifles!”, with great confidence (justified – he was a crack marksman) Brooks found excuses not to show up. He was less of a hero then.

The ghost of Hamilton, whose life-story Miranda turned into an enormously successful stage musical, must have prompted the plot of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Season 9 closer. Which, in its own way, illustrated the wisdom of the Irish Duelling Code’s Rule 12.

As pleaded afterwards, David intends to flout it by deliberately missing. But thanks to another sub-plot, he is wearing loose trousers, which fall at the crucial moment, causing him to accidentally shoot the star of his musical in the mouth. Miranda’s vocal chords have to be rested due to paint damage. Fatwa! the stage show is cancelled.