Humour based on sectarianism — at any level — always struggles to be funny
We still have sectarianism in Northern Ireland, hate-filled contempt in some hearts for people perceived as the communal enemy. But we make jokes about it, perhaps to reassure ourselves that the little sectarian notion that has crossed our minds is not really intended to offend.
That humour was shared with English audiences in the TV series The Derry Girls. In one episode, the girls on their way to a church-led reconciliation project at which they will meet Protestants express their nerves and their curiosity. Protestants are people they have heard talked about darkly or in hushed tones. My father, a Derry man, would speak of ‘your own’ and ‘the other sort’. The girls wonder if there will be enough Protestants to go round them all. They whisper about sectarianism the way they do about sex. They giggle about what they fear and don’t quite understand but which they know they will have to deal with.
In another episode of The Derry Girls the Protestant and Catholic schoolchildren are brought together to help them get to know each other. They are asked to name characteristics that they perceive in each other’s communities and their answers are written on a blackboard. The children make anodyne and silly observations. Catholics eat fish on Friday. Protestants like soup. Protestants keep the toaster in a cupboard and say a bit extra at the end of the Our Father. Catholics love statues.
These answers are silly but they are safe. None is so blatant and angry that passions would be roused by it.
They might have said, Catholics think they can commit any sin, even murder, and that a priest can put them right with God again. Which they do. Or Catholics think you’re a hero if you have been in jail. Or, Protestants think they are going to go to heaven and all the Catholics are going to hell. Remarks like these would have been too close to representing actual familiar prejudices to work in a comedy sketch.
Northern Ireland loved that blackboard joke and a replica was exhibited in the Ulster Museum. That must mean something. I think the joke was popular because it absolves us. It presents prejudice as ludicrous rather than hostile or toxic, and we like that because it confronts nothing in us that we would feel we had actually to defend. It is a safe parody. Keep your toaster in your cupboard if you like. Who cares? An equivalent might be a racist character in a play whose racism is so ridiculous that even real bitter racists could laugh at it and feel assured that they are not as bad as they might be.
Isn’t that really what the problem was with Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, not that he was amplifying racism but that by making racism ridiculous he was undermining efforts to discuss it seriously.
Another example of this absolving humour is a tape made by loyalists in Belfast, a song called The Pope’s A Darkie. Of course, no one actually believes that the pope is black. The joke represents Protestant sectarianism and racism as ridiculous yet the song was written to be performed to loyalist Protestant audiences. It wasn’t composed to offend Catholics for they were unlikely to hear it.
In one sense it says, you accuse me of bigotry, well, get a load of this. The accused, instead of apologising or giving any credibility to the accusation goes the other way and amplifies the bigotry into the appalling, beyond what anyone actually believes. The joke challenges the liberal who pontificates about how awful sectarianism is. At the same time, it so misrepresents actual sectarianism that no Protestant in the audience is embarrassed by it, their authentic bigotry untouched.
Contrast that humour with another joke that came out of loyalist culture: what’s the difference between a Taig and an onion? Answer: You don’t cry when you slice a Taig. That’s humour that is totally unapologetic about sectarianism. You’ll only laugh at that in safe company among like-minded friends.
There are parodies of sectarianism in drama and satire but they often seem to encourage the audience into a smug comfort that they are not quite as bad as the targets of the joke. Sectarianism is good rich material for satire but satire can never represent it as the worst that it can be or it wouldn’t be satire any more.
For instance, I once saw a woman berate children for playing with a Catholic. “Why are you playing with a Taig? You know he’s a Taig.” This was during the worst of the Troubles so people were angry and afraid. I can’t believe this would happen today.
And a little boy pleads, “No missus, I didn’t know he was a Taig.”
How do you make a joke out of that?
As a reporter I covered the long running picket on a Catholic church in Harryville in Ballymena. I asked a group of protesters why they were protesting against a church and a boy shrieked at me: “It’s not a church. It’s a Fenian hole.”
Sectarianism can only be funny when it is parodied and diminished. And doing that colludes in the pretence that it is really not very serious, merely the preoccupation of stupid people.
This article is an extract from Malachi O’Doherty’s new book, How To Fix Northern Ireland (Atlantic Books).
