Funny Business: Popular Comedy and Entertainment Culture in Northern Ireland

This essay offers a case study of a comedy performer within the entertainment culture of Northern Ireland (NI) between 1949 and 1974. Over a decade ago, Sean Connolly outlined some of the definitional difficulties faced by “the would-be historian of popular culture” in Ireland; he observed that the “issue of cultural interaction across social boundaries” (Connolly 1996:83–90) at particular historical conjunctures and specific locations was central to cultural history. Popular comedy (Palmer 1994:7) is replete with representations of social taboos and taste limits made visible and audible, but its production and audiences also involve complex processes of boundary reformulation. This essay explores how an entertainment business was structured during a period of political rule in NI that was dominated by Ulster unionists. Often fiercely, unionists upheld the position of NI within the United Kingdom (UK) after Ireland was partitioned in 1920. This case study is therefore set within an overarching narrative of a unionist political history—from the postwar reassurance about the “permanence” of the union (the Ireland Act of 1949 with its “guarantee”) to the traumatic dissolution of the NI parliament (1972) at the height of the “Troubles.” It explores how an entertainment business was distinguished by “degrees of shifting attachment and interaction” (Williams 1958:310) with formal and informal political and cultural institutions. And it analyzes the cultural hegemony enacted in comic performance (McConachie 1989:48) by investigating the multiple institutional and cultural contexts in which such entertainment took place.

The historiography of social and cultural life in NI before 1968 remains under-researched. Leslie Clarkson has advised that academics “should not partition social processes, nor impose patterns on the past where none existed, but [try] to understand the nature of human activity in the mundane matters of getting and spending” (Clarkson 2000:12). But this model for analyzing material production and consumption seems to capture only partially the role of culture in the social processes of NI. Grey (1983) has surveyed how the urban population of Belfast routinely spent its leisure time on popular entertainment up until 1914, and Bardon has addressed the comedy and entertainment programming of the BBC (Bardon 2000). Non-academic collections of reminiscences of popular hobbies and pastimes from the 1930s to the 1960s (Love 1982) provide insights into the everyday economics of leisure. Such demotic cultures, produced and consumed as inconsequential fun, including those mediated via radio, film, and television, potentially provide rich resources for understanding cultural history and for developing cultural theory (Graham 2001:155).¹

The transformations of entertainment culture after 1945 may be usefully tracked through the career of James Young (1918–74), the dominant comic figure within the NI entertainment industry. Though Young has been much celebrated in popular memory, there has been little sustained academic analysis of his significance to a wider cultural history (Cranston 1996; Bardon 2001; Moore 2003; Pettitt 2005). While The Force of Culture (1999) shows how unionist elites attempted to produce a cohesive political identity out of literary and cultural activities, including various public rituals and BBC programs (McIntosh 1999:2–3), my emphasis here lies in exploring the cultural significance of an entrepreneur-performer operating in a “business” that presented itself as apolitical and was experienced by its audiences as “only entertainment” (Dyer 1992:11–18). I suggest below how one might understand a transitional phase in the contemporary history of the popular culture of a region—a juncture where residual forms of live performance coexist with and are transformed by broadcast transmission; a period of cultural history defined as existing between the lived memories and the electronically recorded traces of comic performance. Though it is axiomatic that to better understand filmed and broadcast comedy, we need to know about prior live entertainment forms (Medhurst 1986:185), we also need to locate such performances, “to make the interpretation conscious by showing historical alternatives; to relate the interpretation to the particular contemporary values on which it rests,” while avoiding the sense that we can “return” the performance to its period (Williams 1961:69).

More broadly, within cultural studies there...