“Get on, man; get on!” said a traveler to his car-driver. “Wake up your nag!” “Shure, sor,” was the reply, “I haven’t the heart to bate him.” “What’s the matter with him?” inquired the traveler; “is he sick?” “No, sor,” answered the jarvey, “he’s not sick, but it’s unlucky he is, sor, unlucky! You see, sor, every morning, before I put him i’ the car, I tosses him whether he’ll have a feed of oats or I’ll have a dhrink of whisky, an’ the poor baste has lost five mornings running!”
“Did you notice no suspicious character about the neighborhood?” said a magistrate to an inexperienced policeman. “Shure, yer hanner,” replied the policeman, “I saw but one man, an’ I asked him what he was doing there at that time o’ night? Sez he, ‘I have no business here just now, but I expect to open a jewelry sthore in the vicinity later on.’ At that I sez, ‘I wish you success, sor.’” “Yes,” said the magistrate, “and he did open a jewelry store in the vicinity later on, and stole seventeen watches.” “Begorra, yer hanner,” answered the constable after a pause, “the man may have been a thafe, but he was no liar!”
“Bridget, I don’t think it is quite the thing for you to entertain company in the kitchen.” “Don’t ye worry, mum. Shure, an’ oi wouldn’t be afther deprivin’ ye o’ th’ parler.”
An old lady in Dublin, weighing about sixteen stone, engaged a car-driver to convey her to a North Wall steamer. Arrived there, she handed the driver his legal fare—sixpence. Gazing disconsolately at the coin in his hand, and then at the fat old lady, he exclaimed as he turned away—“I’ll lave ye to the Almoighty, ma’am!”
“Prisoner,” demanded a magistrate of a man charged with begging, “have you any visible means of support?” “Yes, yer honor,” replied the prisoner, and then turning to his wife who was in court, he said, “Bridget, stand up, so that the coort can see yez!”
Now it is plain that we have here a fairly representative selection of the kind of wit and humor that is supposed to come to us out of Ireland. Some of it no doubt is reasonably good, some of it is quite mild. Possibly it is amusing, and calculated to tickle old-fashioned people. Yet one has distinct qualms about it when one considers it as a means for provoking the laughter of the twentieth-century person. The fact is that humor has been made so much of a cult in the modern mind that it has to be very humorous indeed, not to say a trifle subtle, if it is to raise a smile. And in considering the examples quoted, we are faced with a further difficulty. Are these anecdotes of unquestionable Irish extraction? I am afraid not. Their authenticity is impeachable. Mutatis mutandis, they have been told of Cockneys and Yorkshire men, and Somersetshire men, and even of Scotchmen. Furthermore, there is nothing in them that can be considered peculiarly and exclusively Irish, or indicative of the Irish temperament and character as it exists to-day. Your modern Irishman, as I have pointed out, is a dreary and melancholy wight. Laughter and sprightliness have died out of him, and whether in thought or word he is about as dull and plantigrade as even a sad man can well be. The eminent people who stand for Ireland in this country are all of them afflicted with a similar lack of cheerfulness. Rouse them, and they can be as bitter and vituperative and aboriginal as any Scotchman of them all; but their ordinary habit is sad, uncertain, and inept, and they do not know how to laugh. Here and there one of them at the Bar, or in the House of Commons, or at a greasy journalistic banquet, does his feeble best to keep up the Irish tradition for smartness and wittiness of remark. But the attempt is invariably a failure, because at the back of it there is no real brain and no real flow of spirits. One of the biggest bullies at the Bar is a beefy Irishman who esteems himself a great humorist. I have heard him fire off twenty or thirty idiotic jokes in the course of half an hour or so, and always does he snigger at the beginning of his precious gibe; always does he snigger in the middle; always does he make pretense of becoming apoplectic with chortle at the end. The circumstance that people laugh at him and not with him, does not appear to occur to his small, if legal, mind. His dearest friends call him “the sniggerer,” and it is said that he is in the habit of retiring to his chambers of afternoons for the purpose of having a protracted fit of giggling. Primed with four or five glasses of cheap port, his capacity for low comedy becomes so evident that one trembles lest some enterprising theatrical manager should offer him the Leno-Welch part in next year’s “Little Goody Two-shoes.” Another “witty” Irishman, who shall be nameless, came to these shores with a fair array of good gifts at his disposal. Knowing himself for an Irishman, and having faith in the Irish tradition, he forthwith set up in business as a posturing clown and professional grinner through horse-collars, with the result that his genius is altogether obscured. Irishmen of all degrees will do better if they endeavor to remember that they have really no sense of humor left. The only one of them who has made anything like a satisfactory reputation in London, Mr. W. B. Yeats to wit, has helped himself to it by being as devoid of humor as a bone-yard. Mr. Yeats has never been known publicly to try his hand at the very smallest joke. The sobriety of the hearse is his, and much good sense also. For the eminent Irish, as we know them among us, are by nature neither witty nor humorous; and those who try to be so, succeed in being only fatuous and vulgar. Somebody has said cuttingly that a Frenchman consists of equal parts of tiger and monkey. Of certain of the eminent Irish in London it may be said that they are half jackal and half performing dog; for they are at once hungry and fantastic.
CHAPTER XV
MORE WIT AND HUMOR
The real truth about Irish humor as a thing to itself and apart is that it is based either on ignorance or on a certain slowness of mind. The Dublin car driver who on being told by a constable that his name was obliterated from his car replied, “Arrah, me name’s not Oblitherated, it’s O’Grady,” no doubt achieved what will pass among the average for humor. All the same, he did not know that he was saying anything good, and his mot, if mot one may call it, was the direct outcome of a profound ignorance of the English language. The books of Irish humor abound with instances of this form of humorsomeness: “You are not opaque, are you?” sarcastically asked one Irishman of another who was standing in front of him at the theater. “Indeed I’m not,” replied the other, “it’s O’Brien that I am.” Clearly one might manufacture this kind of humor ad infinitum. The Chinese are said to consider it a great joke if a man should fall down and break his arm, and I have seen Englishmen laughing at a man who has been unfortunate enough to have his hat blown off in a high wind. But the Irish do not laugh at these things. Even the native bull, of which they are so proud, fails to tickle them. The Irishman says his bull solemnly and unconsciously, and the Englishman does the laughing. In essence the Irish bull is really a blunder. Nuttall, with his usual charming frankness, defines a bull as “a ludicrous inconsistency, or blunder in speech.” Children and Irishmen are always making them: “If it please the coort,” quoth an Irish attorney, “if I am wrong in this, I have another pint which is equally conclusive.” An Irish reporter, giving an account of a burglary, remarked: “After a fruitless search, all the money was recovered, except one pair of boots!” A Dublin clerk on being asked why he was a quarter of an hour late at the office, made answer: “The tram-car I came by was full, so I had to walk.” “This is the seventh night you’ve come home in the morning,” observed an Irish lady to her spouse, “the next time you go out, you’ll stay at home and open the door for yourself.” The following advertisement is said to have appeared in a Dublin newspaper: “Whereas John Hall has fraudulently taken away several articles of wearing apparel, without my knowledge, this is to inform him that if he does not forthwith return the same his name shall be made public.” An Irishman who accidentally came across another Irishman who had failed to meet him after a challenge addressed him in these words: “Well, sir, I met you this morning and you did not turn up; however I am determined to meet you to-morrow morning, whether you come or not.” “Dhrunk!” said a man, speaking of his neighbor, “he was that dhrunk that he made ten halves of ivry word.” A man who was employed as a hod-carrier was told that he must always carry up fourteen bricks in his hod. One morning the supply of bricks ran short, and the man could find but thirteen to put in his hod. In answer to a loud yell from the street one of the masons on top of the scaffolding called out: “What do you want?” “T’row me down wan brick,” bawled Pat, pointing to his hod, “to make me number good.”