You Either Get It or You Don’t

People have lost their sense of humor.

Not shoved it in a basket or the rubbish bin.

Lost it the way a man loses his dignity in a public toilet with no lock: suddenly, publicly, and with witnesses.

If you can’t laugh, fook off. The rest of us have work to do.

That’s the trouble with the humorless. They treat a joke like a fire alarm. One wrong word and they’re evacuating the building. The old priests at least had the decency to threaten you with hell. These ones threaten you with an HR meeting.

My Gran had the right of it.

“If all you’ve got is lemons,” she’d say, “eat the fookin things. Lemonade is for people with the strength to squeeze.”

We didn’t have the strength.

We also didn’t have Father McGee’s permission.

That man could find sin in a boiled potato.

That’s Irish humor.

We grew up with famine, eviction, and priests who thought a smile was the first symptom of Protestantism. You either learned to laugh or you learned to starve with a straight face. Being a Proddie, I was always up for his face like hell on a good day. But Gran, being a Catholic, made sure I had a balanced education. I got the works. I made the spud look like a Saint as far as Father McGee was concerned. I was a bad little bastard from hell and my Gran was housing the spawn of the devil himself. But she stood firm. And I thank her for that. 

My armor was humor. It beat the fook out of being the only Protestant in the room and I chose being known as the dimwitted Proddie Hopper who laughed at everything and it was somehow the lesser of two evils. 

When I moved to Australia, I saw similarities. 

Australia got the same education, only with extra homework.

Convicts, drought, floods, bushfires, and a wildlife catalogue that reads like God lost a bet.

A huntsman on the ceiling is not an infestation. It’s a roommate who doesn’t pay rent and occasionally drop-kicks a cockroach onto your toast.

An Irishman and an Australian walk into a pub.

That’s not the start of a joke.

That’s everyday. 

We laugh at things that aren’t funny because the alternative is sitting in silence with the news on.

Gran again:

“Make light of the heavy or the heavy will make a hole in you.” Made me think about Happy Expat's article. 

There’s another thing about Irish humor that the serious people never understand.

You have to be able to take the piss out of yourself first.

If you can’t laugh at your own stupidity, your bad haircut, your mistakes, your botched DIY project, your football team or the fact that you’ve just walked into a glass door in front of forty people, what business have you got laughing at anybody else?

We were brought up on self-inflicted humiliation.

Someone falls off a bicycle and the first question isn’t, “Are you all right?”

It’s:

“Did anybody see that?”

If they did, you’re finished.

But you’re also laughing. That’s the trick.

Humor doesn’t make the bruises disappear. It just stops the bruises from becoming your entire personality.

Australians understand this.

An Australian can break his leg, lose his roof in a cyclone and discover a snake in his underwear and still say, “Yeah, mate. Bit of a day.”

That’s not denial. That’s life.

The great Australian contribution to the Irish philosophy of suffering was the phrase, “She’ll be right.”

The great Irish contribution was, “Ah, sure, fook it.”  Or " McFookit " if you happen to live in Dusty Gulch. 

Between the two of them, entire generations survived.

We don’t laugh because life is easy.

We laugh because it isn’t.

And there is something deeply democratic about a good joke.

It doesn’t care how important you think you are.

Prime Minister, bishop, billionaire, professor, celebrity, chief executive or bloke who thinks he’s God’s gift to the local bowls club -  give us ten minutes and we’ll find the funny bit.

Usually it’s you. 

That’s why humor makes people nervous.

A joke can knock the legs out from under the gobshite in about six seconds. And leave a politician feeling like he has been caught with his pants down. 

No committee. No inquiry. No three-hundred-page report. No strategic communications consultant.

Just one perfectly timed sentence and suddenly the emperor is standing there wondering where he left his trousers.

And maybe that is what we have forgotten.

You don’t have to agree with a joke. You don’t even have to like it.

You can roll your eyes, tut loudly, walk away and tell everyone at work that you were appalled. But you don’t have to call the authorities.

Sometimes a joke is just a joke.

Sometimes gobshite is just  gobshite.

And sometimes the healthiest thing a nation can do is have a bloody good laugh at itself before somebody else does it for us.

You either get it or you don’t.

If you don’t, that’s fine.

Go and stand over there with the people who think a punchline is a form of violence. We’ll save you a seat.

Outside.

I blame the Blarney Stone. Kiss it and you get the gift of the gab.

I think Gran held me up to it as a baby and whispered, “Go on, ruin dinner parties for the rest of your life.”

I can say complete rubbish in this accent and someone will still lean in and go, “God I love the way you say ‘constitution.’”

Which brings me to elections.

Next time there’s a referendum, don’t bother with pamphlets.

Wheel me out.

I’ll stand there with a pint and that soft Irish lilt and say:

“Now listen to me, my loves. Vote the way Paddy tells you. The words don’t matter. They didn’t last time. You all just liked the voice.”

After the Voice, I realised half the country wasn’t voting.

They were being read to.

Fook, I could be Prime Minister. I’d last three weeks. Then I’d call a journalist a gobshite on live television, the markets would hiccup, and I’d be back in the pub explaining that “gobshite” is a term of endearment where I come from.

Which, to be fair, it is.

Sometimes.

Laughter is still the best medicine.

It’s also the only one that doesn’t require a prescription, a waiting list, or a statutory declaration that you haven’t recently had an un fookin allowed thought.

Father Ted understood. Take the mickey early and often.

If you wait for permission, the mickey takes you, your house, and the last decent joke in the country.

Because humor is not the opposite of seriousness.

It is how serious people survive serious things.

An Englishman, an Irishman and an Australian are on a plane. The engines fail. The pilot says there are only two parachutes.

The Englishman says, “I have a wife and children.”

The Irishman says, “I have the gift of the gab. I’ll talk us down.”

The Australian says, “Beauty. I’ll take the two parachutes and you two can keep talking.”

That’s the difference.

One of us is still laughing on the way down.

You either get it or you don’t.

 Paddie