Retro ethnic slurs

From Watership Down:

There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight.

Wow. OK, if someone made a joke about New Yorkers being argumentative or people from Iowa being boring (sorry, Tom!), I wouldn’t see it as being in poor taste. But somehow, to this non-U.K. reader, Adams’s remark about “Irishmen” seems a bit over the top. I’m not criticizing it as offensive, exactly; it just is a bit jarring, and it’s kind of hard for me to believe someone would just write that as a throwaway line anymore. Things have changed a lot since 1971, I guess, or maybe in England an Irish joke is no more offensive/awkward than a joke about corrupt Chicagoans, loopy Californians, or crazy Floridians would be here.

23 thoughts on “Retro ethnic slurs

  1. But somehow, to this non-U.K. reader, Adams’s remark about “Irishmen” seems a bit over the top

    The majority of Ireland (the island) is not part of the UK. Personally, as an Irish person I find the constant assumption that Ireland and the UK are interchangeable to be far more offensive that the quoted passage. I don’t really find either of them to be particularly offensive, but the UK thing is annoying.

    • Disgruntled:

      RIchard Adams, the author of the book, is English. England is in the U.K. As I wrote above, I didn’t quite view Adams’s line as offensive, exactly. It just seemed weird and a bit off.

    • I read that not as an assumption that Ireland is part of the UK, but rather that the joke came from within the UK. Which seems fair, as Richard Adams is English.

  2. Watership Down was written by an Englishman for a UK audience and published in England. Evidently, such a throwaway line was not jarring to this audience at that time. No one is confusing Ireland with the UK.

    Personally, I find the constant assumption among the Irish that they are the only ones who know basic geography to be offensive. Really, I got the vapors. I swooned. They had to revive me with smelling salts.

  3. It was around 50-80 years earlier in the US that Notre Dame sports teams were dubbed “The Fighting Irish”.

    Also, read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Englishman,_an_Irishman_and_a_Scotsman where it appears that the Irish, English, Scot jokes seem to poke fun in each direction. (Being an American, I don’t know if the jokes tend to poke less fun at the Englishman, or how offensive they are, but a couple of them are really funny. Especially the joke about the fly in the beer.)

  4. A similar thing just struck me reading Rod Smith’s poem “Ted’s Head”. It accurately describes a scene from the Mary Tyler Moore show in which Lou physically intimidates Ted, his employee, into not exercising his contractual rights. It’s only because we love Lou and think Ted is an idiot that we can enjoy the scene. Out of context, it’s just really creepy, I think. Or maybe I don’t have a sense of humor. Or maybe it seemed different in the 1970s. As a variant on Smith’s counterfactual, we might imagine the same scene worked into the plotline of the Office.

  5. My political correctness, if that’s the right term for wincing at jokes or comments based on ethnic stereotypes, has waxed and waned over the years. Now I think you don’t kick a man (or an ethnic group) when he’s down, but for groups that aren’t especially downtrodden I don’t really have a problem with joking about stereotypical behavior. Drunken, brawling Irishmen, money-obsessed Americans, Germans obsessed with orderliness or speaking a language that sounds like a trunk rolling down the stairs…all fine. Nobody avoids hiring Germans or Irish or Americans. Similar types of jokes about blacks or American Indians, not so fine.

    • Phil:
      I would mostly agree, Irish jokes don’t bother me, but they really bother my kids.
      (Their great grandparents were from Ireland and they had no contact with the grandparent from that side – so its just the name.)

      I think is that people need to better discern in any ill intent is intended in making the joke.

    • So, The Irish have not had any problems so it’s OK to poke fun at them….but God forbid you tell a Jewish or Black joke? This is really crazy….

  6. Here’s the original (again): “There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight.”

    Suppose it had read: “There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can.”

    Just excising the last 4 words still leaves an interesting–but non-offensive?–comparison, right?

  7. I think you should give some weight to the phrasing – to “refuse to fight” would be to turn away from a direct challenge. There’s a lot of serious stuff about Scots-Irish culture and honor codes written much more recently than _Watership Down_.

  8. In Europen Heaven, the British are the police, the French are the chefs, the Italians are the lovers, the Germans make the cars, and the Swiss run the government.

    In European Hell, the British are the chefs, the French make the cars, the Italians run the government, the Germans ate the police, and the Swiss are the lovers.

  9. On the age-old question of what is funny and/or offensive, and how variable that is, Darrell Huff’s How to lie with statistics, first published in 1954, and referred to in a previous thread http://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2012/04/how-to-mislead-with-how-to-lie-with-statistics/ offers interesting examples:

    1. The book is in print from W.W. Norton, but the language suggests that it has been surreptitiously edited to modern sensibilities (e.g. wordings include Down’s syndrome or blacks, which I’ll bet were not the 1954 originals).

    2. But the cartoons appear to be the original cartoons by Irving Geis and date very poorly. Several (17 on a quick count) show people smoking in ways evidently intended as normal decorative detail or directly humorous, including two of a baby smoking. These wouldn’t get past first base these days. I doubt I’m the only one who finds them unfunny and in poor taste.

    A British paperback version from Penguin in 1973 replaced the cartoons with fresh ones by Mel Calman.

    On one level, this should be no surprise. Attitudes to smoking in 1954 were widely different. And if you wait long enough, a book can become a classic and ethnic slurs (or whatever) become part of what is discussed. Shylock or Fagin in Shakespeare or Dickens?

  10. Another ethnic slur? Watership Down was required summer reading for my kid when he was in 5th or 6th grade. He hated it, so I would read it aloud to him. The only way we could get through it was that every time the word rabbit appeared in the text, I would drop the final letter. What’s amazing is (1) how long it stayed funny, and (2) how seldom that word actually appears.

  11. You wouldn’t see much along these lines now (anti-Irish prejudice in the UK has nearly disappeared), but in the 1970s, this kind of comment wouldn’t have raised many eyebrows. After all, the Evening Standard published this cartoon as late as 1982.

  12. Just to add a comment; in England in the 19th century, so-called “navvies” built canals and railroads across the country. They were a hard-working and hard-living breed, prone to drunkenness and falling out with the local populace wherever they went. Much of the traditional English view of the Irish dates from this period.

  13. I don’t recall anything dishonorable about fighting in “Watership Down.” It is a war novel based on Richard Adams’ comrades’ experiences when they parachuted behind German lines in Operation Market Garden in 1944 — i.e., “A Bridge Too Far” — and then had to escape through enemy territory by making like rabbits.

Comments are closed.