NOT SELDOM lurks the sage's cap and gown beneath the motley costume of the clown." This saying once again points out that not enough people apportion human sagacity to qualities such as wit, humour and waggishness. The saying above was the well earned moniker of one of Ireland's most ambitious and outstanding satirical projects, the journal Dublin Opinion.
A few years ago, while studying history at university, I included a sketch from the pages of Dublin Opinion in an otherwise turgid script I had prepared on civil servant recruitment in the Republic. I was admonished and berated for the inclusion of something so trivial, by a tutor whose blushes I will now spare, in an otherwise "serious piece". I
was, of course, referred to more serious tomes perched on the library shelves.
What this person, and many others, do not realise about the journal/magazine Dublin Opinion is that it represents our past better than so many other more lauded works. Within its pages, I found difficult political concepts explained, historical personalities decoded and ancient quarrels elucidated. Little did I know that such comic selections had been dreamt up by so few.
Satirical series
It will surely happen that when historians come to poke around the ruins of 20th century Ireland they will consult this satirical series and discover new truths about what we were like.
Dublin Opinion was set up in March 1922, with Arthur Booth as first editor, its first issues dealing with the Civil War tensions that were to prove so corrosive. It was made plain at this early stage that the magazine felt all combatants should pull back from the abyss. But instead of appealing to those itching on the trigger in terms, of rhetoric and pious indignation, the cartoonists and scribblers on Booth's magazine used satire.
Along with Booth were the two men who were to become synonymous with the magazine, Thomas J. Collins and Charles E. Kelly. Their names, and surely Booth's, if he had manned the helm longer, can now he mentioned when talking of Ireland's great satiric minds. Many readers will concur with this view but how many of them realise that Kelly and Collins edited the magazine for nearly 50 years?
Collins and Kelly were both civil servants, serving in the then withdrawn Department of Education, before embarking on their adventure in the year of Booth's death, 1926. In the subsequent decades, they filled the magazine with what they called "gentle humour".
It was a brand of humour, almost alien to the 1990s, which was deep in thought, at times scathing but rarely judgemental. From their bountiful pens, poured cartoons, limericks, lampooning poems and sketches which barely required captions. There were thousands of great moments.
Exasperated de Valera
My favourite is the April 1937 cover which shows an exasperated de Valera in his office opening the door to a ghostly Robert Emmet, who wants to "know about his epitaph". Dev replies: "So perhaps you'd call back later" and shows him the door.
Another drawing shows a rotund Free State politician atop a platform looking for votes, faced with a swelled crowd holding up a bed.
"What's this?"
"It's the bed you were under in 1916," they reply.
There were also the series of Shakespeare and . . . Shakespeare and golf ("enter citizens with clubs"), Shakespeare and Lawn Tennis ("do you smell a fault"). Let's not forget the ceilithe in the Kildare Street club, the Tailtean Games, and the Tramps Congress.
The creators of much of this were Collins and Kelly. They were co editors "both distinct and equal in all things". But from their offices in O'Connell and Middle Abbey Street they worked tirelessly on each issue.
Collins, so multi talented that he found time to write two operettas, wrote many of the hilarious pieces he penned as either "Lycurgus" or "Clement Molyneux". Like his colleague Kelly, Tom Collins was a deeply religious man but this did not prevent him from sending up many of the church's more obtuse obsessions.
No less Awesome
Charles E. Kelly's contribution to the magazine was no less awesome, his drawings and cartoons are now legend. He was a clever bystander at passing events, able to understand the context of those events but also to extract the humorous morsel. Even the time he spent as director of broadcasting at RTE did not blunt his humour. His illustrations of Dev, as The Irish Times editorial devoted to him on his death, helped "to demythologise the guerrilla".
The ability to conceive comedy in social events has been successfully passed on to his son Frank.
Vivian Mercier, writing in The Bell in 1947, said Dublin Opinion had only six stock jokes. The implication was that Collins and Kelly's task was one of simple duplication. This was unfair to both of them. Not once over the decade did their prodigious output wane; the standard in 1968, when the magazine was wound up, was still high.
The jokes may have been stock but of a high quality. All aspects of life were subjected to their twin barbing. From the West Britonism of the Irish Independent to the then stuffy Protestantism of The Irish Times. The fastidiousness of Irish officialdom to the rule bending of consumers.
Although only momentarily alluded to in their compilation, Forty Years of Dublin Opinion, both Tom Collins and Charles Kelly mention the climate of hatred that was swirling around their heads in the first decade. Their endeavours made such a climate bearable to a large number of people. A later attempt to resurrect the magazine in 1988 lacked the dynamic of "gentle humour" that had been devised by Collins and Kelly and did not survive.
These two men left a legacy in the pages of the magazine they summed it up in their own aphorism: "Humour is the safety valve of the Nation."