Trying to have the ‘Craic’ in America
One of the things I miss most about Ireland is the slagging.
“The standard of name-calling in this club is appalling!”
The hurling trainer stood shocked on the stage, his outsized hands flapping in the air and sweat beads falling down his face. The club were in a county hurling final and Timmy Ryan was could not believe the naivety his team displayed when it came to basic game tactics. So, he had to give them a quick pep talk before the most important game of their lives.
“Make sure the referee can see you but he can’t hear you. Then you start lads. You insult his mother, you insult his grandmother, his sister, his family, every one seed, breed and generations of them. Insult the shite out of them. Annihilate them. Lambashte them. Make sure that man hits you. When he hits you, you hit the ground. He gets the line, we get the free. Fifteen men down to fourteen lads… Ye don’t even know how to play the game!”
The onlookers were convulsing in waves of laughter as Ryan agitatedly paced over and back in front of them.
"Oh, they say Timmy Ryan?... Timmy Ryan is too hard on us!”
The somewhere-from-Co Limerick-or-Co Tipperary GAA coach stopped dead, eyeing his audience.
“Well, I will tell ye something now lads, I’m not!”
The upturned faces, were now crying in hysterics, unable to contain their guffawing as he defiantly ended his rant with a plaintive prediction: "Ye will know all about it next year when ye are playing under-14!”
The auditorium in the Galway theatre roared in a climatic crescendo, as the audience revelled in the hilarious send-up of every archetypal GAA manager of every small GAA club in rural Ireland.
Timmy Ryan was performed by the late and legendary Jon Kenny, who rose to fame as one half of ‘D'Unbelievables’, the successful comedy partnership with Pat Shortt that lasted until 2000. While in college in Galway, my friend David Keane (himself from the East Galway Tommy Larkins rural hurling club) and myself (from Moygownagh football club in North Mayo) chanced our arm and queued up at An Taibhdhearc theatre in case of any no-shows to Kenny and Shortt’s sold-out performance. We were beyond lucky and got to witness one of the most brilliant live comedy shows by two artists at the peak of their satirical and comedy genius.
Kenny and Shortt brilliantly captured the essence of Irish life through hilarious, razor-sharp observational humour. Their genius lay in creating characters so authentically local that every Irish person could recognise someone they knew, while performing with impeccable comic timing and genuine affection for their subjects. By transforming mundane everyday situations into comedy gold, they didn't just make people laugh - they held up a loving, satirical mirror to Irish society, celebrating its quirks, characters and unique cultural nuances with unparalleled wit and warmth.
Jon Kenny was lampooning ‘sledging’ as an intricate part of every Gaelic football or hurling match, which I think every GAA player has either experienced or actively took part in (or both), of verbally harassing opponents to disrupt their concentration and performance. At its most extreme, it can be horribly disgusting, as when I once witnessed an opponent actually insult his own team mate who failed to pass him the ball, as “an ‘effin orphan” because the younger player had lost his father. Most times it is relatively harmless, as when I was told to ‘shut up with your stupid hair’, or after I overplayed the result of an opponent’s physical challenge and was told ‘ya did better acting on Fair City, ya gimp!’ (that one stung).
A sign of how the GAA is clamping down on ‘sledging’ is evidenced by referee Maírtín Ó Flannabhra giving a confused Ballycroy man a yellow card who claimed he was ‘only having the ‘craic’, when telling one of my Moygownagh teammates to ’feck off ya 40-year-old!’ Apparently, it was deemed ageist (but I would have taken it as a compliment).
Ballina native, social media comedian and musician, Garron Noone, has also hilariously lampooned the Irish fondness for engaging in playful teasing or ‘slagging’, which can appear to an unfamiliar observer as bordering on the psychopathically vicious. In fact, these extreme forms can cross the line from playful teasing to genuine insults, especially in the heat of the moment during intoxicated conversations or (as we have seen) on the sports field. I think that’s what makes them so adrenaline-fuelled enjoyable, as both participants and observers know that the over-and-back one-upmanship can always fall into the genuinely offensive by one foul word.
However, now that I am in the United States and Los Angeles in particular, I really miss having that ‘craic’ in day-to-day conversations. That way of teasing each other is just not a thing over here, especially as well-meaning listeners take what I say at face value, leading to a lot of confusion and some awkwardness.
We actors, in particular, can be very sensitive to inappropriate language, especially in an era where the industry is very conscious (perhaps too conscious) of offence being taken. So, I have learned to hold back on the sarcastic reply just dancing on my lips while in actors’ workshops or in industry webinars. I personally do not want to become the next martyr for political incorrectness, for wanting to tell an actor that their emotional scene reminded me of Waiting for Godot but without the urgency’ I thus find myself engaged in ‘pleasant’ conversations rather too often and miss the comraderie of playful but stinging insults.
Then, before Christmas, I joined a new friend of mine in a dive bar in Glendale, where we spent the night playing pool with the locals, drinking whiskey and absolutely sledging each other to bits, in increasingly testosterone-fuelled taunting. My Irish accent (and inability to remember each daft American rule of pool) came in for particular abuse and I loved every single moment. Indeed, most of the abuse came from my friend, who grew up in a blue-collar Irish community in Chicago before joining law enforcement. There, he said, you earned respect from your peers by how well you could take the ‘ribbing’ you were getting and how well you could top those insults with even better retorts. I told him to stop posing like a hairy eejit and take his shot at the pool table if he could. He missed…
Timmy Ryan would have been proud.