St. Patrick’s Day: Enjoy Your Filthy Irish Day, Filthy Irish People

(Please note: I don’t actually hate the Irish. Oh, how I love to pretend that I do, though.)


I remember it like it was yesterday. 1993. A 12-year-old John Papageorgiou was watching an episode of The Simpsons titled “Whacking Day” (it was a more innocent time), the plot of which revolved around the eponymous yearly holiday where the citizens of Springfield beat upon the town’s snakes (maybe it wasn’t a more innocent time). In the episode’s penultimate moment, Bart, in an attempt to get the assembled mob from smashing every serpent in sight, revealed the origins of Whacking Day:


BART: People of Springfield, Whacking Day is a sham! It was started in 1924 as an excuse to beat up the Irish!


(Out of the crowd steps the most Irish-looking creature this side of the Notre Dame mascot, pictured above.)


IRISHMAN: ‘Tis true. I took many a good lump. But ’twas all in good fun!


Young me turned to his mother, a look of bewilderment upon his face and asked the following: “Mom, you can hate the Irish?”


Up until then, my exposure to racial and ethnic humor had been incredibly limited. It began in kindergarten, with assorted jokes about a Chinaman going pee pee in a bottle of Coke that, at the time, were the pinnacle of avant-garde wit. Then, in second grade, came that fateful Sunday afternoon where my uncle took me aside and performed his unofficial one-man show that I’ve affectionately come to title as “Welcome to the N-bomb, Johnny.” From there, things stagnated for a while. I grasped that you could deride Asians and blacks (there were special words in my vocabulary for doing just that), but the rest of the prejudice I’d encountered in my life up until then had actually been aimed at me, be it through the delightful mispronunciation of my “weird and foreign” last name as “Poopageorgiou” or my nickname “Elvis,” bestowed upon me because I had full sideburns by age 12. The moment that I comprehended that white people weren’t some homogenous, unmockable mass, but a sea of various ethnicities ripe with stereotypes to pick on, my passage into manhood began.

By the time middle school rolled around, I had done my homework. My German friends were now beer-guzzling Jew-haters whose grandparents licked Hitler’s boots in between filming 8mm scat bondage films. My Jewish friends were now money-grubbing cheapskates with complete control over the worlds of entertainment and finance who spoke in that annoying, deliberately paced rabbinical voice. (I’d make a joke about those stereotypes not being too far off, but I’d like to actually get ahead in show business someday, so f you, Palestine!) And the Italians I knew were short, hairy mama’s boys whose stereotypes hit way too close to home, so they were okay in my book.

For whatever reason, though, it was the Irish stereotypes I enjoyed the most. Translucent skin. Alcoholism. The Irish Curse. And that’s just scratching the surface. They delivered spectacularly on so many levels. The fact a majority of my friends at the time were Irish no doubt helped, but I’d like to think I would have enjoyed such rich veins of hate regardless.


So drink until you get your fill tonight (we all know how long that will take), sons and daughters of Hibernia. While every ethnic group loves to brag about their ability to consume vast quantities of liquor while remaining upright, you alone actually deliver on this boast down to every man, woman and child. Now get out there and show us how it’s done!

Tagged as: Simpsons,  St. Patrick's Day.