Northern Ireland Satire

Northern Ireland Satire: Laughing Through the Complicated Bits

Northern Ireland satire operates in the most complicated comedy territory in the British Isles: a society that spent thirty years of the Troubles generating material that could not be safely turned into comedy, followed by a peace process that made the comedy possible but did not entirely resolve the subject matter. The result is a satirical tradition characterised by extraordinary precision, a very high tolerance for ambiguity, and jokes that require both parties to have agreed, in advance, that this one is allowed.

The Specific Difficulty of Troubles Comedy

Comedy about the Troubles was, for most of the period between 1968 and 1998, either impossible, dangerous, or both. The subject matter was genuine violence, genuine grief, and genuine political division of a kind that the satirical distance required for comedy was very difficult to maintain. The dark humour that the people of Northern Ireland developed for internal use – the jokes that circulated within communities about their own situation – was not comedy that could be safely exported, because its meaning changed depending on who was telling it and to whom. The CAIN Web Service at Ulster University is the comprehensive archive of the Troubles period.

Give My Head Peace and the Post-Ceasefire Comedy

Give My Head Peace, the BBC Northern Ireland sitcom that ran from 1996 to 2008, was the first television comedy to treat the Northern Ireland political situation directly as comedy material, and it did so by the simple and brilliant method of making both traditions ridiculous simultaneously. The loyalist family and the republican family, connected by marriage and divided by everything else, provided a structure in which no community’s pretensions were left unexamined. The show was enormously popular in Northern Ireland and largely unknown elsewhere, which is itself a satirical observation about the limits of regional comedy. BBC Northern Ireland’s archive holds surviving episodes.

Derry Girls: The International Breakthrough

Derry Girls, created by Lisa McGee and broadcast on Channel 4 from 2018, is the most successful piece of Northern Ireland comedy ever made, and its success rests on a specific satirical insight: the Troubles, viewed through the eyes of teenagers primarily concerned with boys, friendships, and school, become the background absurdity against which the foreground comedy of adolescence takes place. The comedy is not about the Troubles but the Troubles are always there, which is both historically accurate and structurally brilliant. Channel 4’s Derry Girls page holds all three series. The show was watched by audiences globally who had no direct experience of Northern Ireland, which suggests that the comedy of living alongside an ongoing political situation that you did not create and cannot fully resolve is more universal than Northern Ireland’s specific history implies.

The DUP and Sinn Fein: Comedy Writes Itself

The specific comedy of Northern Ireland’s post-peace-process politics – the mandatory coalition between parties that spent decades trying to destroy each other, governed by an agreement that requires them to share power regardless of mutual incomprehension – is available to international satirists as pure comedy without the weight of lived experience that makes local satire more complicated. The image of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness laughing together in the Stormont Assembly, which earned them the nickname the Chuckle Brothers, is one of the more improbable images in modern political history. Both men appeared to find it funny. This is either evidence of comedy’s healing properties or evidence that reality is reliably stranger than satire.

The Border Comedy

The Irish border – invisible before Brexit, the subject of intense constitutional anxiety during the Brexit negotiations, and now the subject of arrangements that satisfy nobody and that everyone has agreed to describe as satisfactory – is one of the more productive geographical comedy subjects of the twenty-first century. The specific comedy of a border that must not be a border in order to preserve a peace agreement, while also being a border in order to satisfy a referendum result, operates at a level of paradox that satire can illuminate but cannot resolve. Northern Irish satirists have been living in this paradox for years. They are very funny about it.