A Place for Jokes in the Politics of Place

Abstract

Heinrich Baell has remarked that it seems natural in Ireland that we joke about serious things since not to do otherwise would drive us to despair. One wonders has much changed in the thirty years since the publication of his Irish Journal? Certainly, I am too young to speak about the days when the sight of a Morris Minor trundling down the boreen was something to run home and tell your mother about. Still, today, I do not regard it unusual when someone beside me folds over into spontaneous reels of laughter the moment they encounter disaster. The tears come afterwards of course, but as a society it is perhaps safe to say that our sense of humour is one of our worst and greatest assets. The Americans love it and the Germans literally fall out of the ferries to get more. Sometimes however our sense of. humour darkens and takes on a political flavour. This will form the focus of this paper.