The thing about being funny, Leo, is if you have to tell people you are – you aren’t
EXPLAINING a joke, New Yorker writer EB White once observed, is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process. If it’s any consolation to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, as he faces yet another bout of public frog-dissecting when he returns home to the fallout from his American visit, the frog in question was pretty much dead from the get-go.
No frogs were harmed in the process of our Taoiseach attempting a joke, since nobody realised it was meant to be a joke at the time, and any fleeting gasp of humour had long since expired by the time he got around to dissecting it. Not that it was an entirely pain-free experience, though. In fact, it will be quite a while before any of us will be able to uncurl our toes enough to remove our shoes, after the experience of watching our Taoiseach explain, in agonising detail, his concept of a ‘humorous anecdote’.
He was just being funny, he said, when he told about receiving a phone call from Donald Trump, then a businessman, reality TV star and the only Simpsons cartoon character ever to appear in his natural skin-tone. He was simply using comic licence when he claimed he’d made a phone call about a planning permission issue. The punchline, apparently, was meant to be that The Donald, now President of the United States, was crediting Leo with a stroke he didn’t actually pull. Truly, it’s the way he tells ’em. And, yes, he was there all week.
It is very many years since the late Brian Lenihan Sr was able to joke, on The Late Late Show, about offering ‘a pint or a transfer’ to a garda who had attempted to break up a late-night lock-in. Even professional comedians have to be ultracareful about their choice of subject matter these days, and topics that were once a staple of sitcoms and stand-up routines are now strictly out of bounds – just look at the millennials’ po-faced disapproval of Friends for its ‘fat-shaming’ and ‘transgender’ gags.
So the areas into which politicians can stray, when they wish to enliven a speech with a joke, are even more limited. And, aside from obvious no-go subjects like gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation, the whole business of planning permission is best avoided by Irish politicians in a jocular mood. We spent 15 years and more than €300million investigating alleged political interference and corruption in the planning process, through the longest-running and most expensive judicial tribunal in our history. Planning permissions, and the mysterious ways in which they move, are still a very sore point in this country. You can’t even utter the word ‘envelope’ on television, as onetime presidential hopeful Seán Gallagher discovered to his cost, without serious blowback. It will be a while before we find planning ‘strokes’ amusing. As comics say, ‘too soon’.
And it’s not as if the Taoiseach has impressive form on the whole ‘off-thecuff humour’ front, especially when it reveals him to be inappropriately overawed by his surroundings and his circumstances. The quip about Love Actually and the Downing Street staircase, when he visited the British Prime Minister for the first time last year, was leaden but forgivable, so long as the star-struck act had turned out to be a once-off.
Mocked
A young, newly elected leader was entitled to confess a human response to a historic occasion, and Theresa May seemed genuinely charmed by his unaffected delight. But the ‘humorous anecdote’ about Trump’s call smacked a little too much of awestruck fawning, of ‘how amazing that somebody as important as Donald was calling somebody as insignificant as an Irish Government minister’. It really would have been a lot funnier if the punchline had featured the minister telling the future president of the United States that he could go through proper channels, or he could talk to the hand.
The first rule of political humour is never, ever stray off script, no matter how funny the story that’s just struck you, and how much you think your audience will lap it up. That way lies disaster. But even when Leo has been working off a ‘comic’ script, it still hasn’t ended well. Remember his attempts to ‘roast’ some colleagues and critics at that Fine Gael think-in last year, in the style of a White House Correspondents’ Dinner? He bragged about his strong support in Cork, while his defeated leadership rival Simon Coveney sat looking uncomfortable, he mocked Kate O’Connell’s description of his supporters as ‘choirboys’, and he even brought up Brian Cowen’s famously ‘congested’ Morning Ireland interview. Barack Obama might have made that line of patter look easy, but he’s a genuinely funny guy and his gags were still clearly scripted and rehearsed. Even Donald Trump can be funny when he sticks to somebody else’s lines: Talking about a proposed meeting with Kim Jong-un, at a recent speech to journal- ists, he quipped: ‘As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that’s his problem, not mine.’ Mind you, I wouldn’t fancy being that scriptwriter when The Donald finally gets that joke.
But if there’s a second rule of political humour, though, it’s that nobody expects a competent national leader to master gags, one-liners and stand-up comedy too. Standing up and making other people laugh is one of the toughest, and bravest, things to attempt, and not everybody can pull it off. It is perfectly acceptable not to do ‘humorous anecdotes’ and still be taken seriously on the world stage. Even when taking part in an informal occasion, there’s no obligation on a premier to play it for laughs. Have a look, if you doubt it, at that picture of Éamon de Valera wearing a Native Indian headdress when he was made an honorary chief of the Chippewa tribe on a trip to Wisconsin in 1919. See if you reckon his expression invited any teasing or ‘p**s-takes’ when he got home.
Humour doesn’t come naturally to the Taoiseach, but that’s fine. He wasn’t elected to represent us on Live At The Apollo. Small talk and trivialities are not his strong points but, to judge by those gushing emails from Bono that this newspaper printed yesterday, he is more comfortable talking about issues that engage him in the company of folk who are equally serious and intense. After he’d wangled a dinner with the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and the Finance Minister just before Christmas last year, Bono wrote to heap praise upon the ‘three wise men’, and to hail Leo as a ‘21st-century leader’. He felt ‘unutterably proud’, he went on, that our country was entrusted to such giants among men. The evening and the conversation, he wrote, were ‘inspiring’ and ‘brilliant’, and indeed we can easily imagine how earnest and profound their chat would have been. But it was, I’d hazard a guess, rather short on laughs.
Being powerful, Margaret Thatcher used to say, is a bit like being a lady: if you have to tell people you are, then you aren’t. Since that line might land her in hot water with the transgender community today, perhaps it is more usefully adapted for the Taoiseach’s purposes as follows: Being powerful is like being funny: if you have to tell people you are, then you aren’t. He doesn’t have to tell anyone he’s powerful, and certainly not with lame jokes about planning permission. He is the leader of a modern European country, he’s got a high popularity rating at home, he’s doing a good job of holding the Brexiteers to their word over the border, and Bono thinks he’s a great fellow altogether. He needs to start channelling Dev in that feathered headdress, rather than Ken Dodd with his tickling stick, and firmly nip any attempts at jocularity in the bud. Comedy is best left to the professionals and dissecting frogs (like, I strongly suspect, Leo’s true sense of humour) is strictly for nerds.