THE HUMOUR OF DUBLIN

By Des MacHale

Many visitors to Ireland are surprised by our huge variety of accents—from Belfast and Donegal to Galway, from the Midlands to Dublin, all the way down to Cork and Kerry, and not forgetting Wicklow, Waterford and Wexford. But few seem to be aware of our great regional variations in the types of humour we have too—Belfast wit and Galway wit are like chalk and cheese, while Cork humour and Dublin humour could be from different planets.

The late, great and much lamented Niall Toibin, a Corkman exiled in Dublin, and one of the finest comedians and mimics this country has ever produced, matched only perhaps by the legendary Jimmy O’Dea and Maureen Potter, always maintained that the essence of Dublin humour was indignation. A Dubliner is never happy unless he or she is indignant about something. He used to tell the story of a Dubliner passing a fire brigade practice who accidentally got drenched by a fire fighter’s hose. Indignantly, he shouted, 'Yez wouldn’t do it to me if I was on fire’.

One of the great Dublin comic stereotypes is the two auld wans, frequently female, on a bus and their hilarious conversations, which are quite serious to them, but very funny to us. They are guaranteed authentic of course, because we have all overheard them ourselves. Here are a few choice examples.

First auld wan: I’m thinkin’ of shavin’ me legs.

Second auld wan: They say it’s a great way of losin’ weight.

First auld wan: I had a meal in McDonald’s last week.

Second auld wan: What was it like?

First auld wan: Well, I’ll tell you one thing. He’s come a long way since he had that farm.

This time it is two auld fellas upstairs on a bus.

First auld fella: I was readin’ in de paper de other day about all dem icebergs meltin’ and floodin’ de planet.

Second auld fella: I heard about dat. It’s de greenfly effect.

Back to the two auld wans on a bus again.

First auld wan: I see where Biddy Mulligan has just cremated her fifth husband,

Second auld wan: It’s not fair—some of us can’t get a man at all and other women have husbands to burn.

First auld wan: Me sister is having a lung transplant.

Second auld wan: Oh, I don’t think I’d like that. Imagine swallowing someone else’s phlegm.

First auld wan: Me husband died in an accident in at the Guinness Brewery. He fell into a vat of porter and was drowned.

Second auld wan: Was it a slow and painful death?

First auld wan: I don’t think so, because he got out three times to go to the gents.

First auld wan: How is your son getting’ on in the army?

Second auld wan: Terrific! He joined up only a month ago and already they’ve made him a court marshal. And the other lad too is a model citizen—he’s always helping the police with their inquiries.

First auld fella: Me daughter has taken up the opera and she’s playin’ the caterpillar in Madam Butterfly.

Second auld fella: Maybe someday she’ll be playin’ the biscuit in the Marriage of Fig Roll.

First auld wan: I just love the DART and the LUAS.

Second auld wan: I think they are terrific too, but it will be even better when they circumcise the whole city.

First auld wan: Wasn’t it terrible about Jimmy Byrne?

Second auld wan: Why, what happened to him?

First auld wan: Well, he was workin’ on a building site when a big steam hammer fell a hundred feet onto his chest and killed him stone dead.

Second auld wan: I’m not surprised. All them Byrnes had fierce weak chests.

First auld wan: Me son is paintin’ the house for me this weekend.

Second auld wan: But I thought he was in Mountjoy serving ten years for aggravated assault and battery.

First auld wan: He’s after getting time off for good behaviour.

Second auld wan: It must be a great consolation for you to have such a good lad.

First auld wan: I don’t know what to get my grandson for his birthday.

Second auld wan: Why not get him a book?

First auld wan: Don’t be daft—he has a book already.

Brendan Behan and his family must go down as some of Dublin’s greatest home-produced wits of all time. They had a problem with drink of course, mostly as Brendan said, because they couldn’t get enough of it! He once described the pint in a certain pub as ‘not fit for washing hearses’. Regarding himself as a drinker with a writing problem, Brendan Behan probably left more genuine humorous quotations behind than any other Irish writer, except maybe Oscar Wilde, but Behan’s quotes were always more down to earth and explosively funny. Here are just a few of them:

Shakespeare is dead, James Joyce is dead and I’m not feeling too well myself.

There is no bad publicity except an obituary notice.

People never actually swim in Dublin Bay; they are merely going through the motions.

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They know exactly how it should be done; they see it done every night, but they cannot do it themselves.

We had a bath in our house but thank God we never had to use it.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a policeman, but they found out my parents were married.

Cork people would steal the cross from behind Jesus’s back and leave him hanging in the air.

The first item on the agenda of every Irish organisation is ‘the Split’.

Kilbarrack, over by Howth, my father always maintained, was the healthiest graveyard in the country, with the sea air.

America is the land of permanent waves and impermanent wives.

I am a communist by day and a Catholic after it gets dark. When I am healthy, I am not at all religious, but when I am sick, I am very religious.

I have never seen a situation so bad that a policeman could not make it worse.

Even on his deathbed, Brendan Behan’s wit did not desert him. To the nun who was looking after him, he smiled and said, ‘Thank you sister, and may you be the mother of an archbishop’.

Finally, let me share with you an original story I first heard from the great Hugh Leonard which we both felt encapsulated the essence of Dublin Humour:

There was this man living in a high rise apartment in the suburbs of Dublin and he was so holy that he was known as Blessed Barnabas of Ballymun. After he died, all the residents felt that he should be declared a saint so they chartered a plane to Rome to petition the Pope for him to be canonised as Saint Barnabas of Ballymun. The Holy Father graciously granted the deputation an audience and listened carefully to their petition.

‘Blessed Barnabas was a really holy man’, said the chairwoman, ‘he attended mass every morning of his life, did an awful lot of good work in the community, and gave away all of his possessions to the poor’.

‘Very good’. Said the Pope, ‘but before he can be elevated to sainthood, there must be evidence of a miracle. Has there been any evidence of a miracle due to the intercession of Blessed Barnabas?’

‘Yes, your holiness,’ said the chairwoman, and a little Dublin lad stepped forward to speak.

‘Well, one night,’ said the chiseller, ‘Blessed Barnabas went into a pub where there were lots of bad men smokin’ cigarettes and drinkin’ pints of porter. Blessed Barnabas said loudly, ‘This is a nest of vipers and a den of iniquity’, and he went over and pulled the cigarettes from their mouths and plunged them into their pints of porter’.

‘Very good’, said the Pope, ‘but where is the miracle?’

‘Jaysus’, said the little lad, ‘it’s a miracle he wasn’t killed’.

Des MacHale is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at University College Cork, He is an author and speaker on several subjects, including George Boole, lateral thinking , puzzles and humour and will be speaking on the Cork sense of humour at the 50 Plus Show in Cork on the 12th and 13th of September.