|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
A Hall of Distorting Mirrors: British Jokes About the Welsh, Scots, and Irish
| Article
# : |
20480 |
|
|
Section : |
CULTURE
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
4,048 Words |
| Author
: |
Christie Davies
Christie Davies is professor of sociology at the University of
Reading, Reading, England. This paper was initially presented
at the Sixteenth International Conference on the Unity of the
Sciences. |
British jokes about the Irish and Scots are an international phenomenon: They occur--with local modifications--all over the world. Thus the witty and creative Irish are the constant butt of jokes about stupidity, as are the shrewd Belgians in France, the enterprising Sikhs in India, and the go-ahead Jutes of Aarhus in Denmark. And for the same reason: All these peoples live on the periphery of a larger, indeed dominant, cultural and economic unit. (Davies 1990).
Consequently, it is possible for those at the center--in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or New Delhi--to depict these peoples as a comic version of themselves, much as we all laugh at reflections of ourselves in a hall of distorting mirrors. It is not strange or alien peoples who are the butts of this kind of humor but familiar, similar, long-established neighbors or provincials.
Likewise, jokes about the allegedly stingy, crafty, and canny Scots have spread not only to Canada, New Zealand, and the United States--which have received large numbers of Scottish emigrants--but to countries such as Sweden, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Greece, which have few if any ties with Scotland. Once joke tellers have grasped the basic "stupid" and "canny" scripts, they can invent innumerable variations that have only a nominal link to the butts of the jokes:
Did you hear about the Irish woodworm? It was found dead inside a brick.
Scotland yard--two foot eleven inches.
Why do Irish dogs have flat noses? From chasing parked cars.
Why does the British fifty pence have sides instead of being round? So you can get it out of a Scotsman's palm with a wrench.
Comic traits attributed to the Welsh
Though they are the least well known internationally, the oldest of British jokes are those told about my own people, the Welsh. In the jokes of Shakespeare's time we were alleged to be aggressive, boastful, obsessed with our ancestry and pedigrees, and compulsive eaters of cheese. These comic "Welsh" traits are displayed by the Welsh characters Fluelyn, Sir Hugh Evans, and Owen Glendower in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part One, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor,
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
