Objetivos Específicos

Caught Red-Handed was first performed in the Northern Bank Building, in Belfast, in February 2002. The play is set in what was then the future, in 2005. It is the eve of a referendum on a United Ireland, following an ‘ulti-matum’ (Loane 2002: 14) by the American president (Hillary Clinton) to the British Prime Minister (Michael Portillo). The Paisley-like charismatic leader of the Alternative Unionist Party (AUP), itself a parody of the DUP,

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55 is simply know as ‘the Leader’ (giving him despotic associations). He has

staked his reputation on stopping the vote, claiming that it is ‘undemo-cratic’ (Loane 2002: 15), that is until he suddenly dies, on the toilet. His

‘inner circle’ of supporters: Watson (a former paramilitary); McIlroy (a reli-gious zealot); Wayne (the Leader’s son), and Wylie (the party’s spin doc-tor), are unsure what to do, until they see Pat, a Catholic bar steward, who is the spitting image of the Leader. They persuade Pat to impersonate the Leader until they have successfully disrupted the vote. Initially, Pat is reluc-tant, but he then becomes excited by the prospect of power, and the atten-tions of the Leader’s wife, Constance. However, a change of heart leads to him being almost assassinated by Watson, and Wayne takes over the leadership, only to surprise the other members of the ‘inner circle’ when he comes out as gay and embraces a liberal, progressive agenda. The play ends just before the result of the vote is announced, with the outcome in the balance.

Caught Red-Handed is a satire, on Unionist politics, as well as a wider satire on Loyalist culture, and contemporary politics. Wylie is the party’s PR spokesman who, when estimating the turnout for those supporting the AUP claims: ‘Thirty thousand at least. Fifty for the press release’ (Loane 2002: 16). Watson, the macho former paramilitary thinks ‘re-thinking is a sign of weakness’ (Loane 2002: 16), reflecting Constance’s reluctance to drink tea, for doing so ‘seduces us to sit on the sofa and sort out our trou-bles’ (Loane 2002: 39). The play attacks political duplity and Loyalist in-fighting and violence. Indeed, David Trimble, when forced to resign as first minister claimed that his downfall had less to do with his failure to defeat the Republican parties, and more to do with his inability to work with Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party. Pat, once in the guise of the Leader, gets surprisingly enthusiastic about his role, at least initially, glorying in the empty phrases of political rhetoric: ‘I am not now and never have been a member of the Provisional Orange Order, so I cannot speak on their behalf.’

[…] ‘Selling their children off and spreading their tentacles to infiltrate and control other countries as well as their own. That is the real Irish diaspora’

(Loane 2002: 40).

Similarly to The Lieutenant of Inishmore, the play adopts a range of comic techniques, including those drawn from farce and slapstick. As with The History of the Troubles references to sex and bodily functions are common: the Leader is constipated (sufficiently so, it seems, to kill him), and, his replace-ment, Pat, would ‘love to go at Celine Dion’ (Loane 2002: 27). The farcical use of rapid entrances and exits is employed: ‘They [Wayne and Constance]

hear someone coming, panic, then wheel him off quickly. The moment they disappear the opposite door flies open … (Loane 2002: 49). There is a neat sight gag, and theatrical joke, whereby the same actor who played the Leader reappears as Pat who ‘has a remarkable similarity to the Leader’ (Loane 2002:

21), and yet no one notices this for some time. The knowing bricolage of post-modern irony is seen when Wayne and Constance break into Stormont to the sound of ‘Mission Impossible type music’ (Loane 2002: 49), and fantastic cartoon images are evoked when Constance is described: ‘smoke comes out of her ears’ (Loane 2002: 36). The superiority comedy of anxiety is also seen when, for example, Pat repeatedly chastises himself for swearing: ‘Shite, I for-got (and again) Bollocks! (and again) Fuck!’ (Loane 2002: 28).

Religion is also satirized. McIlroy has visions of the risen Christ, who informs the ‘inner circle’ that: ‘Now I have you, you orange bastards’ (Loane 2002: 24).

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Religious moral hysteria is ridiculed when McIlroy is ‘histrionic’ (Loane 2002:

34) when Pat and Constance embrace:

Pat beams and they leave arm-in-arm. Wayne is distraught and McIlroy his-trionic.

McIlroy: Ooohh, the storm clouds are gathering. The earth is preparing to mock our very existence.

(Loane 2002: 34) However, beyond these comic ideas, Caught Red-Handed offers the prospect of the possibility of change within Unionist politics. The intolerance of the Leader is replaced by his son, whose final speeches incorporate Kenneth’s feeling of individual liberation from A Night in November, but also goes on to offer far wider prospects for change and a lasting peace:

Yesterday I had a closet private life, a buried body, a transplanted father, and over-sexed mother and peace in NI to worry about. But I can see clearly now. And for the first time in my life I feel free.

(Loane 2002: 54) There is another way for us. There has to be. I don’t exactly know what it is yet and I can’t pretend I have all the answers because I want to be up front with you. But I do know that I want us to find the way together. And if we lose the referendum we deal with it. It’s not the end of the world; it’s the new beginning of a new challenge… .

(Loane 2002: 57) In his essay ‘Jokes and Joking: a Serious Laughing Matter’, Jonathon Miller claimed that:

The value of humour may lie in the fact that it involves the rehearsal of alternative categories and classifications of the world in which we find ourselves. … [in comedy] we almost always have rehearsals, playings with and redesignings of the concepts by which we conduct ourselves during periods of seriousness.

(Miller 1988: 13) The satire of the play points to all the ‘categories and classifications’ that have prevented Northern Ireland’s Unionist politics, at least within the Democratic Unionist Party, fully embracing the peace process: intransigence, intoler-ance, religious zealousness, fear of ‘the other’, and, in fact, fear of change.

Commentators such as Susan McKay in Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (2000) have commented on the fear, and negative self-definition of parts of the Loyalist community. The script of Caught Red-Handed includes a poem by James Simmons entitled ‘Ulster says Yes’, and in the play’s final scenes we see how this may happen: that Wayne can come out, and lead a grass-roots Unionist party offering tolerance; that McIlroy can abandon his religious judgementalism, finally acknowledging ‘How can something so beautiful be wrong?’ (Loane 2002: 56) when he sees Pat and Constance

‘passionately embrace’ (Loane 2002: 56); that Watson finally realizes that his

‘principles’, which he claimed he would never ‘sacrifice’ (Loane 2002: 57) are

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57 actually little more than an ‘obedient grunts’ (Loane 2002: 57); and that Wylie

can acknowledge the power of honesty.

Caught Red-Handed has never been produced outside of the island of Ireland. It may appear perhaps too schematic and idealistic to appeal to ‘out-siders’, with many specific cultural and historical references (to, for example, the 1973 strike that bought down the Sunningdale Agreement), yet the same could be said of A Night in November, with its sell-out run at London’s Tricycle.

It is the play’s clear, culturally specific political targets that give it a context that prevents the humour from travelling unlike the personal (and therefore more accessible) targets in Marie Jones’ play. For the play to be funny (beyond the sex and shitting jokes, sight gags and farcical door slamming) requires an understanding of Unionist politics: again, context conditions comedy. Walter Ellis, writing in The Sunday Times in 1994 summed up what many Unionists regard as English attitudes towards them:

The English are not touched by our devotion. Rather, they think that we ourselves are ‘touched’, Proper Paddies in fact. Vile is how they see us, just like the Boers, and when we pledge our loyalty, they shy away, embarrassed, as though we had just broken wind.

(Ellis 1994: 32) Most English producers, and audiences, do not care enough about the Unionist experience to find humour in Loane’s targeted barbs.

CONCLUSION

I have perhaps used comedy theory in an overly generalized way in my refer-ences to superiority, incongruity and relief, and there are undoubtedly many nuances, and complexities, that I have overlooked. Nevertheless, I hope that by trying to argue that comedy is culturally located, and potentially politically functional, that I may have made a contribution to a debate. Whether one is considering political comedy, notions of offensiveness and ethics in comedy, or some other aspect of the rich field of comedy studies, I am reminded of the importance of Bergson’s insistence that ‘… to understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all we must determine the utility of its function, which is a social one’ (Bergson 1980: 65). A Night in November offered the peoples of Northern Ireland a character freeing himself of petty prejudice, but to an English audience per-haps helps reinforce certain stereotypes. The Lieutenant of Inishmore offers a rich comic tapestry but only to those who are sufficiently distanced from the reality of the events it describes. The History of the Troubles (Accordin’ to my Da) acts as a therapy to those who have been close to the violence of ‘the Troubles’, but seems largely irrelevant, and unfunny, to those who have not.

The comedy of Caught Red Handed is perhaps unable to transcend its specifi-city. Nevertheless, all these plays ask us to think about alternatives to vio-lence and it is here that Bergson’s ‘utility’ lies.

REFERENCES

Bergson, Henri (1980), On Laughter, Baltimore: John Hopkins University.

Billig, Michael (2005), Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour, London: Sage.

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58

BBC News (2009), ‘Dissident Republicans: threat to peace’, 22 September, http://

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/773157.stm. Accessed 24 September 2009.

Carr, Jimmy and Greeves, Lucy (2006), The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden Meaning of Jokes, London: Penguin.

Critchley, Simon (2002), On Humour, Abingdon: Routledge.

Freud, Sigmund (1991), Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (ed. Angela Richards), Penguin Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

De Jongh, Nicholas, review of The History of the Troubles (Accordin’ to my Da) in The Evening Standard. Theatre Record 21 May – 17 June 2003, P. 709.

Double, O. (1991), ‘An Approach to the Traditions of British Stand-Up Comedy’, Ph.D. thesis, Sheffield: Sheffield University.

Ellis, Walter (1994), The Sunday Times, 26 June 1994.

Gardener, Lynn review of The History of the Troubles (Accordin’ to my Da) in The Guardian. Theatre Record 21 May – 17 June 2003, P. 709.

Griffiths, Trevor (1976), Comedians, London: Faber and Faber.

Hemming, Sarah review of The History of the Troubbles (Accordin’ to my Da) in The Financial Times. Theatre Record 21 May – 17 June 2003, p. 709.

Hobbes, Thomas (2003), Leviathan (eds Karl Schuhmann and G.A.J. Rogers), Bristol: Thoemmes.

Jarman, Neil (2005), ‘No Longer a Problem? Sectarian Violence in Northern Ireland’, Institute for Conflict Research, http://www.community-rela-tions.org.uk/consultation_uploads/OFMDFM_-_Sectarian_Violence.pdf.

Accessed 5 May 2008.

Jones, Marie (2000), Stones in His Pockets, also featuring A Night in November, London: Nick Hern.

Kennedy, Maeve (2005), ‘The Troubles with Fictional Troubles’, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jun/02/hayfestival2005.northernire-land. Accessed 28 October 2009.

Loane, Tim (2002), Caught Red Handed, Belfast: Tinderbox.

Lockyer, Sharon, and Pickering, Michael (2005), ‘The Ethics and Aesthetics of Humour and Comedy’, in Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering (eds), Beyond a Joke: the Limits of Humour, Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3–17.

Lynch, Martin, and Grimes, Connor and McKee, Alan (2005), The History of the Troubles (Accordin’ to My Da), Belfast: Lagan.

McDonagh, Martin (2003), The Lieutenant of Inishmore, London: Dramatists Play Services Inc.

McDowell, Wallace ‘Challenges and Reaffirmations in the Representation of the Ulster Protestant’. Irish Theatre in England, 15 May 2005, National Portrait Gallery, London.

McKay, Susan (2000), Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, Belfast:

Blackstaff.

Maguire, Tom (2006), Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and Beyond the Troubles, Exeter: University of Exeter.

Miller, Jonathon (1988), ‘Jokes and Joking: A Serious Matter’, in John Durant and Jonathon Miller (ed.) (1988), Laughing Matters: A Serious Look at Humour, Harlow: Longman, pp. 5–16.

Mitchell, Gary, Remnants of Fear (unpublished script).

Mitchell, Gary, Stranded (unpublished radio script).

Northern Ireland Office: The Good Friday Agreement. http://www.nio.gov.

uk/agreement.pdf. Accessed 29 October 2009.

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59 Parkinson, Alan F. (1998), Ulster Loyalism and the British Media, Dublin: Four

Court, Peters, John review of The History of the Troubbles (Accordin’ to my Da) in The Sunday Times. Theatre Record 21 May – 17 June 2003, p. 709.

Stepping Stones: the Arts in Ulster 1971–2001 (2001), eds. Mark Carruthers and Stephen Dodds, Belfast: Blackstaff.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Miles, T. (2010), ‘‘Pack up your troubles and smile, smile, smile’: comic plays about the legacy of ‘the Troubles”, Comedy Studies 1: 1, pp. 43–59, doi:

10.1386/cost.1.1.43/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Tim Miles is an Associate Lecturer, and Ph.D. student, at the University of Surrey and a member of the British Institute for Humour Research. He is on the steering committees for the British Institute for Humour and the Popular Performance Network, and on the editorial board of Comedy Studies. His PhD thesis is provisionally entitled ‘Discourses of offence in stand-up comedy’.

In 2009 he was awarded, jointly with Dr Kevin McCarron, a PALATINE devel-opment award to research the teaching of stand-up comedy in UK Higher Education: the findings of which are due to be published in 2010. He has published on the work of the Belfast playwright, Gary Mitchell.

Contact: The British Institute for Humour Research, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH.

E-mail: [email protected]

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