Where is Dublin’s Humor?

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 28, 19 July 1923, Page 17

Where is Dublin’s Humor?

(By Susan L. Mitchell, in the Dublin Freeman's Journal.) When it was suggested to me to write an article on "Humor in Dublin," I rejoiced exceedingly. Now~at last, I felt I should have a chance of showing off, in my own cheery way, those witty sayings of Dublin carmen, policemen, railway porters, and such that one reads so much about, and I hurried round to my friends and asked them to tell me the latest funny things said to them by these ambulatory humorists, on whose jests our -reputation in Dublin for wit is built up. But with one accord my friends denied that carmen ever said anything that sounded funny in their ears —for what householder can see any fun in a jarvey's demand for twice his legal fare —that they had never even heard the voice of a policeman, and supposed them to be deaf and dumb that, far from exchanging bright repartee with a railway porter, they invariably failed to catch his eye on any rare occasion when they required his services. I was strangely crestfallen, as I strapped my note-book and went sadly homewards to commune with my own conscience. Its still small voice spoke firmly to me, and recalled to my mind that though carmen had often been kind to me and blind to my deficiencies in cash, none had ever approached my pocket with a joke. No railway porter had ever expressed otherwise than by facial contortion his opinion of my tip; no Dublin policeman had ever unbent from his absorption in Nirvana to lower me even the astral body of a jest; and, indeed, what unthinkable temerity would induce one to attempt to catch that unseeing eye to which anything under the height of a public building is invisible ? Gone Into Exile In tram conductors, it is true, I have somtimes suspected a grim substitute for humor. No tram conductor has ever been known to welcome a passenger on his exclusive vehicle; his voice as he announces stopping-places or demands fares is void and colorless, but if he presides over an uncovered tram on a day when a particularly vicious rain is falling, what sudden enthusiasm leaps into his eye when he sees the unbrellaless and waterproofless passenger approach; how he leans forward to welcome him to the platform; how he waves his hand heavenwards, carolling his "Excelsior" in those heartening words "Outside passengers only." This may be humor on his part, or it may be just original sin; whatever it is, it will not form a support for a theory of Dublin humor, and I am forced to the conclusion that as a race we are entirely devoid of humor, and that our poverty in this respect has induced other nations to give us alms, and hence it is that all the bad jokes of the universe are put in the mouths of Irishmen. This explains how, it is that if a wit happens by some strange. fortune to be born here he is obliged to export himself. Our Goldsmith, our Sheridan, our Wilde, our Shaw, and, last of all, our Gogarty, took the emigrant ship to their spiritual home. Goldsmith could only express what wit he felt in him when he lived here by such muscular devices as blindman's buff or hunt-the-slipper. Shaw's wit could not make itself beard in the furious silence of Molesworth. Street, or Wilde's shafts penetrate the triple brass of Merrion Square. It was in vain that Gogarty whipped up a sentence to a ravishment of froth, for as he sallied out by Stephen's Green all the Puritanical draughts of Dublin blew it to invisible atoms. He can carry that delicate manufacture far, far more safely in a Loudon drawingroom. I never hear Stephens giving to his whimsical fancy that I do not tremble, fearing that he too may soon, hear the summons bidding him seek his spiritual home. Ireland's Only Joke. Once, long ago, before the Germans conquered England and compelled the ancient Briton to discard his tidy suit of woad, and when Ulster was still in Ireland, one Bricriu conceived the only native joke ever made here. He wanted to jostle out of their dignity the stately queens of Ulster and to this end he built a lovely house and invited to a feast there these lovely ladies and whispered privately in the ear of each as, clad in regal and flowing garments, she sailed with her attendant on his fair green lawn, that she who would be first to enter his house would be queen of the whole province. He wanted to see these dignified dames tuck up their floating trains and run like redshanks,

vieing with each other who should enter the house first, and they did run, and "the noise they made in their contest to enter the kingly house was like fifty chariots arriving there," and there was a clattering and a haltering and a tearing of walls and windows and all that pell-mell of mterial destruction and confusion that characterises the English music hall jest and the cinema humor of to-day, for when the English conquered Ireland they took away our only joke and ever since have been passing it off as their own. I hope no one will dispute its paternity with them or begrudge them the free use of it, for certain loud explosions here in the last year or so make me tremble at the thought that Bricriu's muscular humor might return to its Spiritual home and become a permanent fashion in ..Ireland. If We Had Wit. We do not want it really any more than we really desire in any sense to recall our departed wits. If we had wit in Dublin we would have to arouse ourselves from our happy torpor, for your wit is ever a reformer, and is always exploring some abuse cherished by the witless mind. We are innured to explosions of public buildings, but explosions of our public abuses are more than we could bear. If we had a native humor fussing round we might have our dustbins entirely emptied of their contents every day, and the waste paper and cabbage stumps and bright orangepeel that a liberal municipality cannot bear to deprive us of, and that lends such color to our streets, might be made to disappear, and if the Dublin dust that accompanied these streets decorations'disappeared also we might be able to see our neighbor's faces too clearly, and, deprived of our face-powder.of dust, we might not like the look of each other at all, and old friendships might be broken up "and old tolerations abolished. If we had wit in Dublin our minds might be shaken out of their fatalistic acquiescence in things as they are, and a noble statue be erected in Stephen's Green where a faded wreath on a lamp-post registers its feeble note of interrogation ever year. With a native humor Dublin picture galleries might occupy the central sites now appropriated to publichouses, and we should get cricks in our necks and puzzledom in our souls from the contemplation of modern art. We might get a mighty Metropolitan Concert Hall and be condemned to listen to Beethoven and Wagner, when we can get on perfectly well with an occasional stave of "Bold Kelly, the Boy from Killane." We might even, if humor suddenly appeared here, get postage stamps with something other than a blank spot in their middle to remind us of our black look-out. <~X> :