SOURCE: “Irish Jokes: A Lacanian Reading of Short Stories by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Bryan MacMahon,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 237-45.

In the following essay, Ingersoll discusses humor in the works of James Joyce, Flann O' Brien, and Bryan MacMahon.

Modern Irish literature has had its share of great poems, novels, and plays, but in terms of sheer bulk, it is the short story or the tale in which the Irish have excelled. Traditionally a culture that has offered few possibilities for action other than violence, Ireland has generated an inordinately large number of storytellers, in pubs and in print, for whom talking may be the most meaningful alternative to inactivity or violent action. Surveying any collection of Irish short stories, the reader finds many which bear striking similarities in their narrative structure to the stories told and retold in pubs. These...