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Daggers

The joke thread

By Daggers, in General Chat

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Nick

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Posted
22 minutes ago, Suzie the Fox said:

I’m female. 

Blonde

and a mum. How many jokes do you think I have to endure. lol 

I’d need a recent photo to make an honest assessment tbh.

 

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Vardinio'sCat

Vardinio'sCat

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Posted (edited)
16 hours ago, Beliall said:

well, if it makes you feel any better, i don't discriminate.I'll post jokes about anything. , but you've been around this forum a while. this is the last in a long, long line of irish jokes. why did you pick this one to get upset about?

I feel like this could be the start of a long discussion today. , but i wont apologise. its a joke. 

your example is not the kind of joke i would tell. it makes out your entire "race" to be inferior, mine just makes you look a bit dense. which is the point of all jokes.

BUT. this could be a learning experience. has anyone else seen a joke on here they were upset by and stayed quiet about? would you mind sharing please

 

F**k, accidently just lost nearly 3 hours of a reply, it was fairly comprehensive and nuanced, what a crying shame! lol One backspace and you are doomed. Now that really is annoying. I'll try again but very briefly without all the context and the history I put in before

 

Firstly, I had never been on the joke thread before a few days ago, simples.

 

My concluding paragraph, while I still remember it.

 

In conclusion, imho, you can call a Scotsman tight and it is hard to see how a Scot could be very offended, you can call a Welshman a sheep-shagger to his face, and you are probably going to be fine, it really has no factual basis, there have always been Welsh lasses. But call a Black man lazy, or call an Irishman thick, and you are harking back to racist stereotypes of the recent past, whether you know it or not.

 

I have absolutely no problem with jokes about the Irish, except when they echo those stereotypes which you may well not recognise, but an Irish person would.

 

I remember this song from my youth, and not understanding the lyrics. That was because I was English. It would not be right for me to use the words 'white n****r', but from Elvis Costello it was broadcast across the land.

 

 

 

Most of us English have little awareness of the sins of our past. Ask an Austrian or an Italian child about the facism in their past, you won't get too much detail (although after that election result Mussolini might be making a comeback). It is only the Germans who have rubbed their kids noses in the sins of their fathers, with good reason, but it doesn't mean we don't have some dodgy history ourselves. Joking about Irish people being thick is funny to us English, but I challenge you to go and tell that joke in a pub in rural Ireland, and then ask the good people why it is offensive to them.

 

Here are a couple of pictures from way back, when some English people regarded the Irish as ape-like, bestial, and frankly, subhuman. Just like with Blacks or Jews, it is hard to oppress people that you regard your fellow human beings, so we used to stereotype whole communities.

 

119.jpg

 

 

 

Just to finish, I'm not saying you were using that joke in a malicious way, but that this is a public forum, and I know plenty of Irish people who would know the historical context to which your joke refers.

 

That stereotype is still bubbling away, even if we English don't recognise it as such.

 

Apes, psychos, alcos: How British cartoonists depict the Irish

The DUP’s new prominence has turned the clock back on a strand of British cartooning

Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 05:30
Seamas O'Reilly
The Punch cartoon that depicted the Young Ireland Party as a gorilla

The Punch cartoon that depicted the Young Ireland Party as a gorilla

 

In the fallout from the recent Conservative party and DUP deal, Northern Ireland has enjoyed a rare trip back to the British headlines.

The redheaded stepchild of British politics doesn’t generally get much press these days, but the prize of 10 seats from its largest party was enough to make the papers newly inquisitive and send the British government into flattery mode. So, for a fortnight, we watched as the Tories dripped honey upon their strange new pals, casting themselves as winking prospectors in snakeskin boots, talking some shoeless hillbillies into selling the scrubland over a gold mine.

The problem with Britain’s prior antipathy to Northern Irish issues is that certain political realities that have been present in the UK for decades will be strangely unfamiliar to the public. Nowhere was this more risibly apparent than in the numerous bullet point-studded DUP fact sheets hastily generated by British broadsheets, which profiled the party – a 46-year veteran of British politics – as if it had just landed from the outer reaches of interstellar space (no doubt its journey took it through several of the solar system’s more traditionally Catholic areas en route).

It was also time for political cartoonists to sharpen their nibs and target some unfamiliar quarry. And it was here that the Daily Mail’s Mac received more than a little opprobrium for his approach to the situation.

The wrong stereotypes

One cartoon depicts a supposed Belfast pub, filled with drinkers passed out on the floor, and a sign on the bar saying: “Free Guinness for life!” The caption, a quote from the fictional barman, is “Theresa May took some persuading but eventually the DUP clinched the deal”.

There are a few problems with his cartoon. The first is the staggering racism involved in invoking the drunken Irish stereotype on any pretext. Secondly, the DUP’s evangelical bent means many party big-wigs are entirely teetotal. Furthermore, even those DUP diehards who don’t ascribe to abstinence would sooner drink holy water than Guinness. Despite its solid Protestant, unionist heritage, it is synonymous with Dublin, and therefore not a big hit with the east Belfast set.

The artist in question, Stuart “Mac” McMurtry, is not a newcomer to startling bigotry. He’s been at the coalface of bewildering racism for some time. He has infamously depicted Syrian refugees as rats, leading to many comparisons with Nazi propaganda. It’s of course inaccurate to compare Mac to Hitler: Hitler could draw.

In one of his more extravagant offerings, Mac commemorated the death of TV icon Cilla Black by depicting her path to heaven as being blocked by illegal immigrants crowding the pearly gates, and compared drowning migrants to monkeys.

 
 

Mac in Daily Mail wrong on so many levels: Racial stereotyping; the DUP are teetotalers; if they drank, it wouldn't be stuff made in Dublin

 
 
 
 

£1 billion deal done with DUP to form coalition with Tories by Patrick Blower - political cartoon gallery in Putney

 
 

Planet of the apes

In a way, representations of the Irish long ago worked as a template for this kind of hatred, and the Daily Mail could be merely returning to a legacy of dehumanising the papist rabble as feckless apes. At this juncture, a mention of Punch’s work in the mid-19th century is boringly predictable, but a man can only fit so many ideas in his giant, sloping, hairy forehead – as depicted in its caricature of the “Fenian Guy Fawkes” .

A Punch cartoon from the mid-19th century. Photograph: The Cartoon Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images A Punch cartoon from the mid-19th century. Photograph: The Cartoon Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images

The old Irish caricatures of witless, heavy-browed thugs, sporting ill-fitting waistcoats and squat little tobacco pipes, are so famous as to have become neutered by overfamiliarity. They are cultural oddities you might now see displayed in Irish pubs as acts of ironic defiance. Despite this, however, more than a century and a half later, some still retain a poisonous sting.

Take, for example, the Punch cartoon that depicted the Young Ireland Party as a gorilla. It’s clearly horrifying that Irish intellectuals and lawmakers were routinely cast as apes, but the smaller details stand out. It’s perhaps the petty spite of including a jar marked “Pickled cabbage” behind “Mr G O’Rilla” that makes the jaw drop further still.

Closer to the modern era, the Daily Express’s Arthur Stuart Michael Cummings – a man so right-wing, he made Genghis Khan look like a social worker – was just as liable to reflect Northern Irish citizenry as apelike in bearing. The ordinary British soldier was merely a kindly, put-upon peacemaker, a saintly neutral bound by Christian spirit to hold the two warring gangs apart, lest they hurt themselves.

Pyscho killers

Later, the same “puzzled spectator” trope would be trod out by the Evening Standard’s Jak, painting the various sides of the internecine spats of the Troubles as literal monsters.

Perhaps as Northern Irish citizens, we should be wary of criticising topical paintings, lest our opponents mention the ones found in our neck of the woods: crudely rendered murals of republican heroes squinting beside Nelson Mandela; or wonky, heavy metal skeletons parading their tattered, yet proud, union flags across battlefields. More curious still, we don’t just plop these works in the funny pages but, with a showy kind of masochism, paint them 20ft-tall on the sides of our own homes.

A Nelson Mandela wall mural on the Lower Falls Road in Belfast A Nelson Mandela wall mural on the Lower Falls Road in Belfast

Murals themselves have been prominently featured by many cartoonists, offering artists the chance to do some art within their art, leading to some stirring and thoughtful work by artists such as Morten Morland and Steve Bell.

But even there, some avoid the tricky business of being particularly artful or worthy and instead use the mural as a vehicle to depict an otherwise unremarkable scene, in the hopes that its placement on a wall will do the in-between work for the reader, such as Blower’s recent effort in the Telegraph. It shows a mural of a big DUP man accepting a big bag of cash from a tiny Theresa May. A keen-eyed observer will see the labelled boxes of Champagne being loaded out of a car. Northern Irish politics is so little understood, you see, that the need of textual support for the reader is genuinely great.

Where else but in the grisly, gore-splattered abyss that is local politics could you chance upon such visual aides as a hoisted flag labelled “Fiscal unity” or a soup tureen inscribed “Corporate tax setting powers”? Where else would you find the blood-soaked hand of Bernadette Devlin marked “Irresponsibility”, as in the staggeringly offensive case by the Daily Mail’s Emmwood immediately after the Bloody Sunday massacre.

If you’re explaining . . .

Labels are important and, in political cartooning, some artists live or die by those things they don’t mind spelling out to their audience. F Scott Fitzgeraldonce said that ending a sentence with an exclamation mark is just laughing at your own joke. I’d go further and say that pinning labels all over your cartoon is like recording your own laughter, playing it back, and transcribing each “ha” in the margins.

So, when Cummings wanted to depict a Sinn Féin degenerate among his cabal of Loony Left forces bearing down on his enemies, he felt the need to write “Back Sinn Féin” across the odd little onesie he had him wear, just for the avoidance of all doubt. When taken with the general frenzy of additional text in this astonishing roll call of things the artist hated – blacks, gays, upside-down communists – it rather suggests a lack of faith in one’s talents for visual storytelling.

Toward the middle of that signage spectrum sits the Telegraph’s Matt, for whom planet Earth can often seem little more than a maddening labyrinth of sandwich boards and placards. Witness how, with just a few strokes of his pen, he can conjure the unmistakable ambience of a pub in Ireland’s capital, as two drinkers discuss how “far fewer Americans claim to be Irish these days”.

In truth, Matt’s bitesize nuggets of inoffensiveness are a necessary palate cleanser against the tide of hatred, drudgery and logorrhoea one encounters when considering British cartoonists’ visions of Ireland. So, we’ll end on his take on this week’s events, perfectly ensconced within the gentle, soothing “this thing plus that thing” niche he has so artfully carved out for himself. A picture so bland, so limply unproblematic that, like all the best visual art, you simply couldn’t write it.

It depicts a bowler hat atop Big Ben. With the caption: “The DUP insisted.

Edited by Vardinio'sCat
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Vardinio'sCat

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17 hours ago, Buce said:

 

That’s an interesting reaction, VC. 

 

This subject was broached in another thread a couple of months ago, and during the discussion I stated that I’d never met an Irishman/woman who took offence at ‘Irish jokes’, and added that some of the best I’d heard were in Irish pubs. 

 

For the record, I laughed (though only a little - it wasn’t original, just a variation on a theme) and I’m also half Irish. 

 

But I get where you are coming from - it seems certain racial groups are still fair game for humour, whereas others are protected by norms of social acceptability and even Race Law. 

 

It might make for an interesting thread. 

 

I guarantee if you start telling the Irish jokes about how they are thick, they will not always see the funny side.

 

If they live in England they will have learned to turn the other cheek, perhaps, but, as I just posted, the thick bit plays into some old stereotypes. Do you know much about the Famine and the Punch cartoons? Google it. That is the stereotype in my joke, and in the one I didn't appreciate.

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Vardinio'sCat

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16 hours ago, Beliall said:

well, if it makes you feel any better, i don't discriminate.I'll post jokes about anything. , but you've been around this forum a while. this is the last in a long, long line of irish jokes. why did you pick this one to get upset about?

I feel like this could be the start of a long discussion today. , but i wont apologise. its a joke. 

your example is not the kind of joke i would tell. it makes out your entire "race" to be inferior, mine just makes you look a bit dense. which is the point of all jokes.

BUT. this could be a learning experience. has anyone else seen a joke on here they were upset by and stayed quiet about? would you mind sharing please

 

Ps wasn't asking for an apology mate, not at all. As I said initially, no personal offence taken, it is more on behalf of others I spoke up. I guarantee at least 90% of English people have little or no idea about why it would be offensive to some Irish people.

 

PPs You do realise my joke was not meant to be funny. It was an example of the kind of stereotype that your joke descends from. Bestial, apelike, speakin gibberish, feckess  drunken, stupid etc. In the form of a joke from a very long time ago.

 

PPPs I'm not bloody Irish, I'm English! :rolleyes: My mum is Irish, and I have a village full of cousins, naturally.

 

It was late at night, sorry it wasn't clear. :thumbup:

 

 

 

 

 

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Vardinio'sCat

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Posted
15 hours ago, Izzy Muzzett said:

I remember back last summer I was about to post a joke and had second thoughts. I even PM'd you (as the joke guru on here) to see if you thought it was inappropriate or not. You said you'd have posted it but I think I ended up not bothering in case I offended someone. Anyway here it is and apologies to any of our Chinese listeners etc, etc...

 

I'm told the most common surname in China is Chang.

 

But please correct me if it's Wong.

 

 

 

I was expecting better, frankly. Or more offensive. That would have been better if you just hadn't said it

 

See how I am the joke police now! lol

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Benguin

Benguin

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6 hours ago, Vardinio'sCat said:

 

F**k, accidently just lost nearly 3 hours of a reply, it was fairly comprehensive and nuanced, what a crying shame! lol One backspace and you are doomed. Now that really is annoying. I'll try again but very briefly without all the context and the history I put in before

 

Firstly, I had never been on the joke thread before a few days ago, simples.

 

My concluding paragraph, while I still remember it.

 

In conclusion, imho, you can call a Scotsman tight and it is hard to see how a Scot could be very offended, you can call a Welshman a sheep-shagger to his face, and you are probably going to be fine, it really has no factual basis, there have always been Welsh lasses. But call a Black man lazy, or call an Irishman thick, and you are harking back to racist stereotypes of the recent past, whether you know it or not.

 

I have absolutely no problem with jokes about the Irish, except when they echo those stereotypes which you may well not recognise, but an Irish person would.

 

I remember this song from my youth, and not understanding the lyrics. That was because I was English. It would not be right for me to use the words 'white n****r', but from Elvis Costello it was broadcast across the land.

 

 

 

Most of us English have little awareness of the sins of our past. Ask an Austrian or an Italian child about the facism in their past, you won't get too much detail (although after that election result Mussolini might be making a comeback). It is only the Germans who have rubbed their kids noses in the sins of their fathers, with good reason, but it doesn't mean we don't have some dodgy history ourselves. Joking about Irish people being thick is funny to us English, but I challenge you to go and tell that joke in a pub in rural Ireland, and then ask the good people why it is offensive to them.

 

Here are a couple of pictures from way back, when some English people regarded the Irish as ape-like, bestial, and frankly, subhuman. Just like with Blacks or Jews, it is hard to oppress people that you regard your fellow human beings, so we used to stereotype whole communities.

 

119.jpg

 

 

 

Just to finish, I'm not saying you were using that joke in a malicious way, but that this is a public forum, and I know plenty of Irish people who would know the historical context to which your joke refers.

 

That stereotype is still bubbling away, even if we English don't recognise it as such.

 

Apes, psychos, alcos: How British cartoonists depict the Irish

The DUP’s new prominence has turned the clock back on a strand of British cartooning

Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 05:30
Seamas O'Reilly
The Punch cartoon that depicted the Young Ireland Party as a gorilla

The Punch cartoon that depicted the Young Ireland Party as a gorilla

 

In the fallout from the recent Conservative party and DUP deal, Northern Ireland has enjoyed a rare trip back to the British headlines.

The redheaded stepchild of British politics doesn’t generally get much press these days, but the prize of 10 seats from its largest party was enough to make the papers newly inquisitive and send the British government into flattery mode. So, for a fortnight, we watched as the Tories dripped honey upon their strange new pals, casting themselves as winking prospectors in snakeskin boots, talking some shoeless hillbillies into selling the scrubland over a gold mine.

The problem with Britain’s prior antipathy to Northern Irish issues is that certain political realities that have been present in the UK for decades will be strangely unfamiliar to the public. Nowhere was this more risibly apparent than in the numerous bullet point-studded DUP fact sheets hastily generated by British broadsheets, which profiled the party – a 46-year veteran of British politics – as if it had just landed from the outer reaches of interstellar space (no doubt its journey took it through several of the solar system’s more traditionally Catholic areas en route).

It was also time for political cartoonists to sharpen their nibs and target some unfamiliar quarry. And it was here that the Daily Mail’s Mac received more than a little opprobrium for his approach to the situation.

The wrong stereotypes

One cartoon depicts a supposed Belfast pub, filled with drinkers passed out on the floor, and a sign on the bar saying: “Free Guinness for life!” The caption, a quote from the fictional barman, is “Theresa May took some persuading but eventually the DUP clinched the deal”.

There are a few problems with his cartoon. The first is the staggering racism involved in invoking the drunken Irish stereotype on any pretext. Secondly, the DUP’s evangelical bent means many party big-wigs are entirely teetotal. Furthermore, even those DUP diehards who don’t ascribe to abstinence would sooner drink holy water than Guinness. Despite its solid Protestant, unionist heritage, it is synonymous with Dublin, and therefore not a big hit with the east Belfast set.

The artist in question, Stuart “Mac” McMurtry, is not a newcomer to startling bigotry. He’s been at the coalface of bewildering racism for some time. He has infamously depicted Syrian refugees as rats, leading to many comparisons with Nazi propaganda. It’s of course inaccurate to compare Mac to Hitler: Hitler could draw.

In one of his more extravagant offerings, Mac commemorated the death of TV icon Cilla Black by depicting her path to heaven as being blocked by illegal immigrants crowding the pearly gates, and compared drowning migrants to monkeys.

 
 

Mac in Daily Mail wrong on so many levels: Racial stereotyping; the DUP are teetotalers; if they drank, it wouldn't be stuff made in Dublin

 
 
 
 

£1 billion deal done with DUP to form coalition with Tories by Patrick Blower - political cartoon gallery in Putney

 
 

Planet of the apes

In a way, representations of the Irish long ago worked as a template for this kind of hatred, and the Daily Mail could be merely returning to a legacy of dehumanising the papist rabble as feckless apes. At this juncture, a mention of Punch’s work in the mid-19th century is boringly predictable, but a man can only fit so many ideas in his giant, sloping, hairy forehead – as depicted in its caricature of the “Fenian Guy Fawkes” .

A Punch cartoon from the mid-19th century. Photograph: The Cartoon Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images A Punch cartoon from the mid-19th century. Photograph: The Cartoon Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images

The old Irish caricatures of witless, heavy-browed thugs, sporting ill-fitting waistcoats and squat little tobacco pipes, are so famous as to have become neutered by overfamiliarity. They are cultural oddities you might now see displayed in Irish pubs as acts of ironic defiance. Despite this, however, more than a century and a half later, some still retain a poisonous sting.

Take, for example, the Punch cartoon that depicted the Young Ireland Party as a gorilla. It’s clearly horrifying that Irish intellectuals and lawmakers were routinely cast as apes, but the smaller details stand out. It’s perhaps the petty spite of including a jar marked “Pickled cabbage” behind “Mr G O’Rilla” that makes the jaw drop further still.

Closer to the modern era, the Daily Express’s Arthur Stuart Michael Cummings – a man so right-wing, he made Genghis Khan look like a social worker – was just as liable to reflect Northern Irish citizenry as apelike in bearing. The ordinary British soldier was merely a kindly, put-upon peacemaker, a saintly neutral bound by Christian spirit to hold the two warring gangs apart, lest they hurt themselves.

Pyscho killers

Later, the same “puzzled spectator” trope would be trod out by the Evening Standard’s Jak, painting the various sides of the internecine spats of the Troubles as literal monsters.

Perhaps as Northern Irish citizens, we should be wary of criticising topical paintings, lest our opponents mention the ones found in our neck of the woods: crudely rendered murals of republican heroes squinting beside Nelson Mandela; or wonky, heavy metal skeletons parading their tattered, yet proud, union flags across battlefields. More curious still, we don’t just plop these works in the funny pages but, with a showy kind of masochism, paint them 20ft-tall on the sides of our own homes.

A Nelson Mandela wall mural on the Lower Falls Road in Belfast A Nelson Mandela wall mural on the Lower Falls Road in Belfast

Murals themselves have been prominently featured by many cartoonists, offering artists the chance to do some art within their art, leading to some stirring and thoughtful work by artists such as Morten Morland and Steve Bell.

But even there, some avoid the tricky business of being particularly artful or worthy and instead use the mural as a vehicle to depict an otherwise unremarkable scene, in the hopes that its placement on a wall will do the in-between work for the reader, such as Blower’s recent effort in the Telegraph. It shows a mural of a big DUP man accepting a big bag of cash from a tiny Theresa May. A keen-eyed observer will see the labelled boxes of Champagne being loaded out of a car. Northern Irish politics is so little understood, you see, that the need of textual support for the reader is genuinely great.

Where else but in the grisly, gore-splattered abyss that is local politics could you chance upon such visual aides as a hoisted flag labelled “Fiscal unity” or a soup tureen inscribed “Corporate tax setting powers”? Where else would you find the blood-soaked hand of Bernadette Devlin marked “Irresponsibility”, as in the staggeringly offensive case by the Daily Mail’s Emmwood immediately after the Bloody Sunday massacre.

If you’re explaining . . .

Labels are important and, in political cartooning, some artists live or die by those things they don’t mind spelling out to their audience. F Scott Fitzgeraldonce said that ending a sentence with an exclamation mark is just laughing at your own joke. I’d go further and say that pinning labels all over your cartoon is like recording your own laughter, playing it back, and transcribing each “ha” in the margins.

So, when Cummings wanted to depict a Sinn Féin degenerate among his cabal of Loony Left forces bearing down on his enemies, he felt the need to write “Back Sinn Féin” across the odd little onesie he had him wear, just for the avoidance of all doubt. When taken with the general frenzy of additional text in this astonishing roll call of things the artist hated – blacks, gays, upside-down communists – it rather suggests a lack of faith in one’s talents for visual storytelling.

Toward the middle of that signage spectrum sits the Telegraph’s Matt, for whom planet Earth can often seem little more than a maddening labyrinth of sandwich boards and placards. Witness how, with just a few strokes of his pen, he can conjure the unmistakable ambience of a pub in Ireland’s capital, as two drinkers discuss how “far fewer Americans claim to be Irish these days”.

In truth, Matt’s bitesize nuggets of inoffensiveness are a necessary palate cleanser against the tide of hatred, drudgery and logorrhoea one encounters when considering British cartoonists’ visions of Ireland. So, we’ll end on his take on this week’s events, perfectly ensconced within the gentle, soothing “this thing plus that thing” niche he has so artfully carved out for himself. A picture so bland, so limply unproblematic that, like all the best visual art, you simply couldn’t write it.

It depicts a bowler hat atop Big Ben. With the caption: “The DUP insisted.

I think you have a problem.

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6 hours ago, Vardinio'sCat said:

 

F**k, accidently just lost nearly 3 hours of a reply, it was fairly comprehensive and nuanced, what a crying shame! lol One backspace and you are doomed. Now that really is annoying. I'll try again but very briefly without all the context and the history I put in before

 

Firstly, I had never been on the joke thread before a few days ago, simples.

 

My concluding paragraph, while I still remember it.

 

In conclusion, imho, you can call a Scotsman tight and it is hard to see how a Scot could be very offended, you can call a Welshman a sheep-shagger to his face, and you are probably going to be fine, it really has no factual basis, there have always been Welsh lasses. But call a Black man lazy, or call an Irishman thick, and you are harking back to racist stereotypes of the recent past, whether you know it or not.

 

I have absolutely no problem with jokes about the Irish, except when they echo those stereotypes which you may well not recognise, but an Irish person would.

 

I remember this song from my youth, and not understanding the lyrics. That was because I was English. It would not be right for me to use the words 'white n****r', but from Elvis Costello it was broadcast across the land.

 

 

 

Most of us English have little awareness of the sins of our past. Ask an Austrian or an Italian child about the facism in their past, you won't get too much detail (although after that election result Mussolini might be making a comeback). It is only the Germans who have rubbed their kids noses in the sins of their fathers, with good reason, but it doesn't mean we don't have some dodgy history ourselves. Joking about Irish people being thick is funny to us English, but I challenge you to go and tell that joke in a pub in rural Ireland, and then ask the good people why it is offensive to them.

 

Here are a couple of pictures from way back, when some English people regarded the Irish as ape-like, bestial, and frankly, subhuman. Just like with Blacks or Jews, it is hard to oppress people that you regard your fellow human beings, so we used to stereotype whole communities.

 

119.jpg

 

 

 

Just to finish, I'm not saying you were using that joke in a malicious way, but that this is a public forum, and I know plenty of Irish people who would know the historical context to which your joke refers.

 

That stereotype is still bubbling away, even if we English don't recognise it as such.

 

Apes, psychos, alcos: How British cartoonists depict the Irish

The DUP’s new prominence has turned the clock back on a strand of British cartooning

Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 05:30
Seamas O'Reilly
The Punch cartoon that depicted the Young Ireland Party as a gorilla

The Punch cartoon that depicted the Young Ireland Party as a gorilla

 

In the fallout from the recent Conservative party and DUP deal, Northern Ireland has enjoyed a rare trip back to the British headlines.

The redheaded stepchild of British politics doesn’t generally get much press these days, but the prize of 10 seats from its largest party was enough to make the papers newly inquisitive and send the British government into flattery mode. So, for a fortnight, we watched as the Tories dripped honey upon their strange new pals, casting themselves as winking prospectors in snakeskin boots, talking some shoeless hillbillies into selling the scrubland over a gold mine.

The problem with Britain’s prior antipathy to Northern Irish issues is that certain political realities that have been present in the UK for decades will be strangely unfamiliar to the public. Nowhere was this more risibly apparent than in the numerous bullet point-studded DUP fact sheets hastily generated by British broadsheets, which profiled the party – a 46-year veteran of British politics – as if it had just landed from the outer reaches of interstellar space (no doubt its journey took it through several of the solar system’s more traditionally Catholic areas en route).

It was also time for political cartoonists to sharpen their nibs and target some unfamiliar quarry. And it was here that the Daily Mail’s Mac received more than a little opprobrium for his approach to the situation.

The wrong stereotypes

One cartoon depicts a supposed Belfast pub, filled with drinkers passed out on the floor, and a sign on the bar saying: “Free Guinness for life!” The caption, a quote from the fictional barman, is “Theresa May took some persuading but eventually the DUP clinched the deal”.

There are a few problems with his cartoon. The first is the staggering racism involved in invoking the drunken Irish stereotype on any pretext. Secondly, the DUP’s evangelical bent means many party big-wigs are entirely teetotal. Furthermore, even those DUP diehards who don’t ascribe to abstinence would sooner drink holy water than Guinness. Despite its solid Protestant, unionist heritage, it is synonymous with Dublin, and therefore not a big hit with the east Belfast set.

The artist in question, Stuart “Mac” McMurtry, is not a newcomer to startling bigotry. He’s been at the coalface of bewildering racism for some time. He has infamously depicted Syrian refugees as rats, leading to many comparisons with Nazi propaganda. It’s of course inaccurate to compare Mac to Hitler: Hitler could draw.

In one of his more extravagant offerings, Mac commemorated the death of TV icon Cilla Black by depicting her path to heaven as being blocked by illegal immigrants crowding the pearly gates, and compared drowning migrants to monkeys.

 
 

Mac in Daily Mail wrong on so many levels: Racial stereotyping; the DUP are teetotalers; if they drank, it wouldn't be stuff made in Dublin

 
 
 
 

£1 billion deal done with DUP to form coalition with Tories by Patrick Blower - political cartoon gallery in Putney

 
 

Planet of the apes

In a way, representations of the Irish long ago worked as a template for this kind of hatred, and the Daily Mail could be merely returning to a legacy of dehumanising the papist rabble as feckless apes. At this juncture, a mention of Punch’s work in the mid-19th century is boringly predictable, but a man can only fit so many ideas in his giant, sloping, hairy forehead – as depicted in its caricature of the “Fenian Guy Fawkes” .

A Punch cartoon from the mid-19th century. Photograph: The Cartoon Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images A Punch cartoon from the mid-19th century. Photograph: The Cartoon Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images

The old Irish caricatures of witless, heavy-browed thugs, sporting ill-fitting waistcoats and squat little tobacco pipes, are so famous as to have become neutered by overfamiliarity. They are cultural oddities you might now see displayed in Irish pubs as acts of ironic defiance. Despite this, however, more than a century and a half later, some still retain a poisonous sting.

Take, for example, the Punch cartoon that depicted the Young Ireland Party as a gorilla. It’s clearly horrifying that Irish intellectuals and lawmakers were routinely cast as apes, but the smaller details stand out. It’s perhaps the petty spite of including a jar marked “Pickled cabbage” behind “Mr G O’Rilla” that makes the jaw drop further still.

Closer to the modern era, the Daily Express’s Arthur Stuart Michael Cummings – a man so right-wing, he made Genghis Khan look like a social worker – was just as liable to reflect Northern Irish citizenry as apelike in bearing. The ordinary British soldier was merely a kindly, put-upon peacemaker, a saintly neutral bound by Christian spirit to hold the two warring gangs apart, lest they hurt themselves.

Pyscho killers

Later, the same “puzzled spectator” trope would be trod out by the Evening Standard’s Jak, painting the various sides of the internecine spats of the Troubles as literal monsters.

Perhaps as Northern Irish citizens, we should be wary of criticising topical paintings, lest our opponents mention the ones found in our neck of the woods: crudely rendered murals of republican heroes squinting beside Nelson Mandela; or wonky, heavy metal skeletons parading their tattered, yet proud, union flags across battlefields. More curious still, we don’t just plop these works in the funny pages but, with a showy kind of masochism, paint them 20ft-tall on the sides of our own homes.

A Nelson Mandela wall mural on the Lower Falls Road in Belfast A Nelson Mandela wall mural on the Lower Falls Road in Belfast

Murals themselves have been prominently featured by many cartoonists, offering artists the chance to do some art within their art, leading to some stirring and thoughtful work by artists such as Morten Morland and Steve Bell.

But even there, some avoid the tricky business of being particularly artful or worthy and instead use the mural as a vehicle to depict an otherwise unremarkable scene, in the hopes that its placement on a wall will do the in-between work for the reader, such as Blower’s recent effort in the Telegraph. It shows a mural of a big DUP man accepting a big bag of cash from a tiny Theresa May. A keen-eyed observer will see the labelled boxes of Champagne being loaded out of a car. Northern Irish politics is so little understood, you see, that the need of textual support for the reader is genuinely great.

Where else but in the grisly, gore-splattered abyss that is local politics could you chance upon such visual aides as a hoisted flag labelled “Fiscal unity” or a soup tureen inscribed “Corporate tax setting powers”? Where else would you find the blood-soaked hand of Bernadette Devlin marked “Irresponsibility”, as in the staggeringly offensive case by the Daily Mail’s Emmwood immediately after the Bloody Sunday massacre.

If you’re explaining . . .

Labels are important and, in political cartooning, some artists live or die by those things they don’t mind spelling out to their audience. F Scott Fitzgeraldonce said that ending a sentence with an exclamation mark is just laughing at your own joke. I’d go further and say that pinning labels all over your cartoon is like recording your own laughter, playing it back, and transcribing each “ha” in the margins.

So, when Cummings wanted to depict a Sinn Féin degenerate among his cabal of Loony Left forces bearing down on his enemies, he felt the need to write “Back Sinn Féin” across the odd little onesie he had him wear, just for the avoidance of all doubt. When taken with the general frenzy of additional text in this astonishing roll call of things the artist hated – blacks, gays, upside-down communists – it rather suggests a lack of faith in one’s talents for visual storytelling.

Toward the middle of that signage spectrum sits the Telegraph’s Matt, for whom planet Earth can often seem little more than a maddening labyrinth of sandwich boards and placards. Witness how, with just a few strokes of his pen, he can conjure the unmistakable ambience of a pub in Ireland’s capital, as two drinkers discuss how “far fewer Americans claim to be Irish these days”.

In truth, Matt’s bitesize nuggets of inoffensiveness are a necessary palate cleanser against the tide of hatred, drudgery and logorrhoea one encounters when considering British cartoonists’ visions of Ireland. So, we’ll end on his take on this week’s events, perfectly ensconced within the gentle, soothing “this thing plus that thing” niche he has so artfully carved out for himself. A picture so bland, so limply unproblematic that, like all the best visual art, you simply couldn’t write it.

It depicts a bowler hat atop Big Ben. With the caption: “The DUP insisted.

Terrible punchline after such a long joke.

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Beliall

Beliall

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Posted

@Vardinio'sCatas much as i think you are having the largest over reaction to anything posted on here ever (quite an accomplishment btw, well done) It would be rude of me to not reply after your long arse post that i didn't read entirely


Mate. these origins of the irish stereotype might be important to you, but no one on this planet thinks that about the irish now, certainly not me, and i know a fair whack of them myself, and wouldn't dream of holding in a good irish joke if one came to mind in their company. you're looking to defend a problem that doesn't exist. and you're not even Irish! 

People need to relax a bit sometimes and have a sense of humour. I called the irish thick in that joke. i didn't claim the entire nation was less than human, or (white n) 

jokes are jokes. if they insult a race or nation to the point of demeaning them , its not a joke. its a thinly veiled insult that no one on here would abide. 

what we have here are 2 different stereotypes. your example, that no one alive believes anymore, and mine, which no one truly believes ever but enjoys poking a little fun with. 


This conversation is closed now as far as i am concerned. you wont convince me to stop telling jokes about the irish, blondes, scots , christians, catholics, , gays as long as they are just fun and not demeaning..

ii shared something similar to this the other day. sexist and gay. shoot me 


SAME-SEX RELATIONSHIP PROBLEMS Who's gonna make us ) sandwiches? What do we do with all these sandwiches? EATLIVER.COM
 

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Buce

Buce

Posted
Posted (edited)
11 hours ago, Vardinio'sCat said:

 

I guarantee if you start telling the Irish jokes about how they are thick, they will not always see the funny side.

 

 

You guarantee? Based on what? I have first-hand experience that says you're wrong. My paternal family are all Irish and not one of them has a problem with Irish jokes that depict them as being a bit dim. All of them have the same self-depreciating humour that I have found is common in pubs all over Ireland, North and South. The only difference being that in the North, Paddy and Murphy are replaced by two Proddys or two Fenians, depending on which pub you're drinking in.

 

Quote

 

If they live in England they will have learned to turn the other cheek, perhaps, but, as I just posted, the thick bit plays into some old stereotypes. Do you know much about the Famine and the Punch cartoons? Google it.

 

 

You ask if I know much about the Famine, then tell me to Google it? How fvcking patronising.

 

For the record, I have a good understanding of Irish history, including the Famine.

 

Quote

 

 

That is the stereotype in my joke, and in the one I didn't appreciate.

 

Practically all racial, cultural and national stereotypes stem from historical prejudice. The key word there is historical. The stereotype presented in Belial's joke of someone a bit slow on the uptake is nothing like the shambling, inarticulate, sub-human depicted in the Punch cartoon - to equate the two is ridiculous.

 

I can only suggest that if you are so determined to be offended on someone else's behalf by what everyone else sees as nothing more than gentle ribbing with no malice intended, it would probably be better if you avoided the joke thread in future.

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Trav Le Bleu

Trav Le Bleu

Posted
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On 06/03/2018 at 01:30, Vardinio'sCat said:

 

I laughed for a second, then I paused.  Here is another one. It is a bit old, I'll grant you, but the old ones are the best, apparently...

 

A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo. When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.


-Satire entitled "The Missing Link", from the British magazine Punch, 1862 

 

 

Hilarious, eh? :(  Firstly, I'm Baliall's joke was posted in the light-hearted manner of the rest of the thread, so no personal offence taken. Sorry to be a killjoy, feel like a bit of a knob for spoiling the fun, but this goes back a long way. Mum's Irish, and I wonder how many of these kind of jokes she has laughed along with, in the 55 years she has lived in Leicester. Funnily enough, the Irish aren't looking like the stupid ones at the mo, imho... ;)

 

As I say, no personal offence taken, but I will not laugh along, out of respect for my Mother and her family. I hope people understand that it is harder to say it isn't funny, than to laugh along.

 

Sorry Beliall, I feel bad for calling this out, unless you are Irish, of course, in which case I've just made myself look like a dick for nothinglol I came to this thread for a laugh, just like anyone else. Political correctness gone mad, I expect folks will think.

Joke thread completely derailed.

 

Thanks for that :doh::rolleyes:. 

 

And I thought @Izzy Muzzett had done that already.

 

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Buce

Buce

Posted
Posted
39 minutes ago, Carl the Llama said:

How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?

 

None. :ph34r:

 

3 minutes ago, cambridgefox said:

Quote.Alan Partridge 

 

“well they will pay the price for being fussy eaters “

 

I don't think Vardinio is going to see the funny side of this, somehow.

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