Skip to content

Joke booth: Irish miscellany

video
Posted under Sociology

Eddie from Wolverhampton offers a collection of Irish gags

01 Jun
2007

Video

You need the Flash Player (version 7 or higher) to view this clip - download Flash. http://media.open2.net/lennysbritain/310.flv Copyrighted The Open University

Text

I was touring Ireland last summer in an old camper van and we were down in County Galway, seeing the Cliffs of Mor, and County Clare, and we were coming back and we were heading for Dublin and, of course, the signs are very sparse in that part of that country, and my wife said 'I think we're lost'. So I said well I'll ask the next person we see for directions.

So I saw an old gentleman sitting outside his cottage with a straw hat on and I pulled up and said 'Good afternoon! How do you get to Dublin from here? And he said 'Oh, no problem, my brother Joe picks me up every Friday'.

I had a letter from me mother last week, she's 92, and she sent me the letter and it said 'Dear Ed, I'm writing this letter very slowly because I know you can't read very fast. Your sister Mary had a baby in hospital last week. We don't know yet whether it's a boy or a girl so we don't know whether to call you an aunt or an uncle. Your grandfather is sending you his army overcoat. He said it would keep you warm in the winter with all the building work and that. But when he went to post it, it was too heavy, so he came back and cut all the brass buttons off. Now you'll find them in the right hand coat pocket. Your uncle Joe has bought a new house by the river, why don't you drop in sometime? We don't know the number but you'll find it on the gate when you come. But you won't recognise our house when you come home because we've moved'.

 

But my grandmother, she's 92 and a half, and she went to the doctor last week and said 'Doctor can you put me on the pill?' He said 'Why, you're 92 and a half'. She said 'I know, but I've got 27 grandchildren and I don't want any more, they're costing me a fortune'.

Your uncle Harry got knocked down in Dublin by a double decker bus. He's in hospital and the doctor said they got good news for him and bad news. He said 'do you want the good news or the bad news first?' He said 'I want the bad news first'. They said 'We had to take both legs off at the knees'. He said what's the good news? They said 'The bloke in the next bed wants to buy your new shoes'.

Marie Gillespie Marie Gillespie Marie says

The Irish are not only the butts of jokes. They have a formidable reputation for their humour. Eddie, a 77 year old Irishman, displays all the skills of a seasoned storyteller.

He integrates a series of jokes into a journey, a letter, and a couple of conversations – all personalised as family tales. The jokes play with language and logic. Ireland has produced some of the greatest comic writers in the world (from Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, all of whom were outsiders/insiders to Irish society in some form or other).

Few small countries can rival Ireland's output of popular comedians and entertainers. The comic genius image has long coexisted with comic idiot image. Are Eddie's jokes accidental and stupid or witty and deliberate? At times we don't know. He plays with us, pulling our leg, making us think he is daft but then maybe it is us?

Rate and share this page:

You haven't rated. Average rating 4 out of 5, based on 2 ratings

Share this page:

.

More like this

Comments

Be the first to post a comment.

Login or Register to post comments

Article Information

Publication details
Wednesday, 30th May 2007
Friday, 01st June 2007

Copyright information
• Body text - Copyrighted: The Open University
• Video - Copyrighted: The Open University
• Image 'Marie Gillespie' - Copyrighted: Marie Gillespie

Article Feeds

If you enjoyed this, why not follow a feed to find out when we have new things like it? Choose an RSS feed from the list below. (Don't know what to do with RSS feeds?)
Remember, you can also make your own, personal feed by combining tags from around OpenLearn.

About OpenLearn

Hide

Explore

Try

Study

OU Courses

OpenLearn Now

Hide
The truth behind the torch Copyrighted Image London 2012

As the Olympic flame wings its way around the UK, the OU's Aarón Alzola Romero asks: just how immemorial is the Olympic torch relay?

Tag Clouds

Hide

My Cloud

Discover the latest about your passions - Sign In or Register and start a personal tag cloud.

What are Tag Clouds?
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/sites/all/themes/ole/flash/tagcloud.swf

Creative Commons License Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, content on this site is made available
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence

/openlearn/sites/all/themes/ole/