Troublesome teens
Jonathan in Glasgow tried a couple of "Irish" jokes
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Did you hear about the Irishman who was listening to the match?
He burnt his ear!
Did you hear about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman? All three of them were in the bar. Their wives were all on holiday and they all had 14 year old daughters.
The Scotsman was like 'I was gutted, and in my 14 year old's room I found a packet of cigarettes, and I didn't know she smoked...'
The Englishman said 'That's a coincidence, I was in my 14 year old's room and I found a bottle of vodka, I didn't know she drank, I'm quite upset about this.'
And the Irishman is like 'Oooh, that's quite weird, 'cos I was cleaning my daughter's room, and I found a few condoms - I didn't know she had a c--k!'
Marie says
Jokes about Irish people have a long history in Britain going back to the 17th and 18th century. Cross-cultural joke research indicates that similar kinds of jokes, especially ethnic stupidity jokes, are told about Poles in America, Newfoundlanders in Canada, Belgians in France, Finns in Sweden amongst many others.
Jokes about stupidity are among the most common jokes in the world but who gets called stupid is a matter of historical and social context.
Migrants who move from traditional, rural farming communities to modern industrial societies have to cope with a radically new social and working environment. They become the butt of jokes that revolve around the inappropriate use of language or logic, or the troublesome acquisition of new skills (such as using the telephone or lifts or computers or condoms!).
Such jokes provide ethnic scripts that are adapted and applied to a variety of different ethnic groups. They circulate in and across societies, travelling and spreading in mysterious ways.
Psychologists tend to see such jokes as an indication of levels of aggression and hostility towards a particular ethnic group, and argue that they serve to stigmatise those groups. Ethnic conflict is seen to give rise to these jokes.
Such theories are disputed. Ethnic jokes about stupidity, especially if told in an insulting tone or manner, certainly may give rise to conflict but ethnic conflicts don't necessarily give rise to ethnic jokes.
Rather it is the relative social position and power positions of the joke tellers and butts of the jokes that is the key to understanding these jokes, not the existence of ethnic conflict per se.
People who tell Irish stupidity jokes, or laugh at them, don't necessarily believe the Irish are stupid or want to put the Irish down. Nevertheless such jokes can be used as insults, and the continuing prevalence of such Irish jokes in the survey, signals that old jokes, like the power relaions on which they are founded, die hard.
Content last updated: 30/05/2007
