Why the Drunken, Brawling Irish Got Me Thinking About Hannah Gadsby
What does the ability to take a joke say?
For whatever reason, this year I really noticed the flamboyantly non-PC nature of St. Patrick’s Day. Drinking is the cornerstone of the whole thing, so much so that even hipster cocktail bars will slap a paper leprechaun on the wall and dye their twee bottles of liqueur made from daffodils bright green. The obviously-not-Irish are encouraged to participate, and fake accents abound. My son’s preschool class covered green paper plates with stickers of shamrocks, rainbows, and buckle-clad green stovepipe hats, and I wondered what the equivalent project would look like for, say, Chinese New Year or Cinco de Mayo.
Every comedian knows that you can joke about the Irish. Conan O’Brien, who might be literally the most Irish man who ever lived, jokes about being Irish all the time. 30 Rock is full of Irish jokes about Jack and Dennis and Jack’s high school girlfriend from Boston. TV writers live in fear of the network or a sensitivity reader dragging you into a deadly earnest conversation about a joke you wrote at 2AM while drunk, but I have never heard of an Irish joke triggering that conversation. And then there’s the Notre Dame Fighting Irish logo, which is a literal brawling leprechaun but is beloved and defended by fans of that school.
What should we make of all this? I think the implication is obvious: The Irish are cool winners. Irish stereotypes mattered back when there were political parties dedicated to Irish oppression, but these days, Irish Americans are highly successful according to pretty much any metric you choose. Ireland itself is a robust economy and an intermittently successful soccer team. The Irish in America won — everything they aspired to back when Daniel Day Lewis was trying to drive them out of New York happened. So why should they care if a cultural celebration sometimes bleeds into clumsy stereotypes? How does that hurt them? The answer is: It doesn’t. They’re secure and successful and some lightly-offensive imagery can be — and is — laughed off.
And that got me thinking about the 2017 comedy special Nanette by Hannah Gadsby (because I’m the king of timeliness). You probably know this special: This is the one where Gadsby — who uses they/them pronouns — announced that they were quitting comedy; this turned out to be a highly lucrative career move that launched their next dozen projects. The reason for Gadsby’s retirement pump-fake was that they could no longer abide the harm that comedy was inflicting on gay and transgender people. Here’s part of what they said in the special:
“I’ve built a career out of self-deprecating humor. That’s what I’ve built my career on, and I don’t want to do that anymore. Because do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility, it’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak — in order to seek permission to speak. And I simply will not do that anymore, not to myself or to anybody who identifies with me.”
