IRISH people confidently claim they have a way with words, but there is one line of literature/entertainment that many of us aren't at all comfortable with. In fact, so insecure does it make most people feel that some of us would rather face a hungry Rottweiler with a T bone steak tied around our necks than be the subject of satire.
Who will ever forget the Scrap Saturday radio team reincarnating P. Flynn as P. Flynnstone? Or Charles casting himself as the Baby Jesus and Dessie O'Malley as a Black Sheep in the radio programme's original production of Scrap the Nativity Play?
Well aimed satire, like the two examples above, strikes the satirised with laser guided accuracy. Rarely can one think of the individual again without their satirical side kick somewhere in the subconscious background.
There has been a long tradition of satire in Ireland. In ancient times, travelling poets and bards were held in high estimation. The power of their prose and poetry was such that if someone displeased them, a quickly composed satire could, result in that same person facing ridicule on a grand scale in a small community.
Greatest Satirist
Ireland's greatest and most well known satirist, Brian O'Nolan (alias Flann O'Brien/ Myles na Gopaleen), is a fine example of the durability of satire. Although it is now over 30 years since his death on April 1st, 1966, Brian O'Nolan's brand of wit is still as fresh, funny and fearsome today as it was when first written.
O'Nolan's satirical targets, principally people he considered pretentious, those in whom he discerned dishonesty of character and assumptions not borne out by their abilities, or what he called "cods" for short, were almost all realised and ridiculed in uniquely Irish environments. O'Nolan's satirical aim, despite a profusion of targets, was absolutely deadly.
The phrase "neither popular nor profitable" was uttered, quite often by some people in political circles during the 1940s and 1950s. When O'Nolan began to use it as a pillar of phoneydom in some of his satire, the phrase quickly disappeared from the politician's diction.
He used a plethora of pseudonymous personalities in the pursuit of pure comic destruction. The adventures of Keats and Chapman, two of his favourite characters with a fetish for deflating an arousing story with a desolate pun, rank among the cream of Irish comic treasures.
Violent Argument
On one occasion, for example, Chapman has had a violent argument with a stranger in a pub. He invited him back to his house, knocked the stranger out, and dissolved him with acid. Chapman then took what remains of the stranger - a foul smelling liquid - under the kitchen table and started to drink it. Keats enters the kitchen and asks Chapman, what he's doing. "He dared me to drink him under the table," says Chapman.
O'Nolan received high praise from his literary peers; particularly for his novel about a man who is writing a novel about a man who is writing a novel entitled At Swim Two Birds.
James Joyce even sent O'Nolan a copy of At Swim Two Birds so that its author could autograph it for him. O'Nolan, who rarely missed the opportunity to take a satirical swipe, joked to his friends about Joyce making a literary pilgrimage to Dublin in order to find O'Nolans house.
Niall Sheridan, an old companion of O'Nolan in his UCD days, wrote about his friend at the time of his death: "Now that he is gone, there will be some who can open their morning newspaper with an easier mind."
Scorpion tongued Satire
Indeed, there were quite a few among the plain people of Ireland who slept that bit sounder when the famous satirist disappeared from the scene. Few of them, however, would deny that O'Nolan's scorpion tongued satire illuminated one of the dourest periods, from the 1940s till the 1960s, of Irish social history.
It is ironic, but somewhat understandable, that the great satirist left this life on April 1st.