We will examine the ways in which humour is used to examine the traumas of modern Irish history, and to expose power dynamics around class, gender and sexuality, emigration and immigration, language, nationality, race, and religion. We will think about how humour operates in Irish fiction, what its targets and limitations are, and what the laughter generated in and by these texts can reveal about culture, politics, and society on the island of Ireland.
Ranging from the 1930s to the present, these texts offer intriguing examples of how humorous fiction has illuminated Irish life. This module will consider an excitingly diverse range of novels and short stories that grow out of that tradition. Indeed, in an influential 1962 book entitled The Irish Comic Tradition, the critic Vivian Mercier identified comedy as the principal wellspring of Irish writing.
The wit of Anglo-Irish writers on the page and stage comes to mind (from Swift to Somerville and Ross, Edgeworth to Wilde), as does the multivalent, modernist humour of Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the comedy is at once antic, linguistic, parodic, philosophical, and scatological. The pleasure and power – and the pain – of humour underpins the global reputation of Irish literature. “Irish jokes break bones”, Punch magazine once claimed.
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