There’s an interesting thing between parents.
Fathers and daughters and mothers and sons. The girl will bring the boy home for you to meet and because you’ve talked in liberal terms all your life you have to kind of follow this through.
“Daddy, I’d like you to meet Paul.” Hello Paul. “Uggggg.” “Can I bring Paul in daddy?” Yeah, of course you can. “No, but can he stay here?” Yes of course you can, he can stay for dinner. “No I mean do you mind if he stays here?” What do you mean, stay here? “Ohh stays in the house.” Doesn’t he have a house of his own? Why does he have to live here? “Cause I’d like him to live here.” Well where is he going to stay? “He’ll stay with me.” What? In your room?
And that’s it. He’s in. And they take over. She loved Paul. Paul’s an a**ehole. I come down in the morning he’s drinking tea out of my cup. Reading my paper. Eating my food. And not only that he’s humping my daughter. And I’m out in the garden feeding her rabbit! What should be happening: she should be feeding me and he should be out in the garden with the rabbit.
Irish skill of giving directions
I suppose Ireland is the best place in the world for directions. People will say to you, “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you.”
I was driving to Wicklow town and outside Wicklow town there’s a kind of country road and I came to a cross road and there was one sign post and it had Wicklow on it and the other way was Wicklow. And there was a fella sitting there and I said does it make any difference? And he said, “Not to me it doesn’t.”
The classic: on my way to Limerick and I said to this fella do you know where this place is? And he said, “Ahh yes. Ahh yes. Ohh God yes. Now go down the road, straight down the road just follow your nose. Ahh keep going straight and you’ll see a turn on the right hand side. Now ignore that. And then there’s a second turn on the right hand side and ignore that one as well. There’s two, three, four, five. Five turns on the right hand side, ignore them. Then you see a house on the left hand side, turn left there. That’s where you want to go.”
And I said why did you tell me about all the right hand turns? Why didn’t you just say take the first on the left? And he said “Who’s giving these directions, me or you?”
Read more: Top ten Irish jokes – a snippet of of Irish comedy
Toast at a wake “Here’s to your health”
A very important part of the Irish way of life is death. See if anybody else anywhere else in the world dies that’s the end of it. They’re dead. But in Ireland when somebody dies we lay them out and watch them for a couple of days.
It’s called a wake. And it’s great. It’s a party, a sendoff. The fella is laid out on the table and there’s drinking and dancing and all the food you can eat and all of your friends come from all over the place and they all stand around the wake table looking at you with a glass in their hands looking at you and they say, “Here’s to your health.”
The terrible thing about dying over in Ireland is you miss your own wake. It’s the best day of your life. You’ve paid for everything and you can’t join in. Mind you, if you did you’d be drinking on your own.