Some Comedians Just Aren't Funny - And They Don't Even Have To Be Politicians

"Now step I forth to whip hypocrisy...
"But are you not ashamed? Nay, are you not,
all three of you, to be this much o'ershot?
- Shakespeare: "Loves Labour's Lost"

By Charley Brady

That far-seeing man might have been talking of our own three wise monkeys: Brain Cowen, Brain Lenihan and our missing (believed in action) Mary Harney.

Well, when we spoke last it had been 50 days of silence from the man who has come to be known here as Junket John O'Donoghue. If he hadn't been presiding over the Dail with his customary arrogance, while waving away every reporter who asked him to explain the outstanding spending that he and his wife had rolled in at our expense, I would have thought that he had joined a monastery and taken a vow of silence.

But after 53 days in which the electorate got increasingly cheesed off with him he has (kind of) apologised.

If you could call it an apology.

And by the hokeys, if something was too little, too late, it was this half-assed and typically contemptuous statement:

"I apologise for this. I was fully focused on my duties as an office holder at the time and would not be concerned with this level of detail".

If he had written that "apology" - and we'll leave aside the fact that in a normal country he would have been simply booted out and told, not asked, to repay the loot that he had squandered - in a normal manner he would just have said: "Look. It was my flunkies who squandered the money. Now could you peasants just clear off and stop annoying my unelected wife and me as she was simply enjoying the fruits of my success?"

But of course Junket Johnny didn't want to compromise the dignity of his office. That certainly has us rolling in the aisles here. Dignity? What possible shred of dignity does this chancer have left? Sorry, we peasants keep forgetting what a very important man he is.

We take it back, John. We are lucky to have you. Now what exactly is it that you do again?

On to the increasingly magisterial Irish journalist Mary Kenny, who was reviewing Diarmaid Ferriters' book "Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland".

She writes: "And it certainly was not true, as a dear aunt of mine once assured me, 'there was no rape in Ireland in the 1930s.' There has always been rape: and I wholly agree with Camille Paglia when she states that it is only the civilising controls of society that restrain or inhibit what is essentially a surge of animal male arousal."

Now that just can't be allowed to go unchallenged.

I'll have to say that I could almost forgive Ms. Paglia anything after her outstanding insights into Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", but let's be honest and say that a lot of what she spouts out of her is absolute rubbish.

Look at that last line again: if a man had written such unmitigated and unsubstantiated drivel he would probably have been stripped naked and placed on an ant hill, there to find to find the errors of his ways.

Men - real men - the ones who don't take some perverse pride in terrorising women in order to keep themselves from pursuing "a surge of animal arousal" behave in a way that is the polar opposite to that.

Most blokes that I know - and I know that the feminists won't love me for this - are actually caring and considerate. To be honest, if they were not then I wouldn't be in the same room as them.

I don't like apes.

You see, apart from the loony tunes in our society (and heaven knows there's a lot of them, regrettably), we actually like women and thankfully most of us treat them as the ladies that they are.

We don't need the constraints of society to stop us behaving in an abhorrent manner; we just need our conscience and a natural sense of what is wrong and what is right.

That two intelligent women like Mary Kenny and Camille Paglia can believe this nonsense is offensive to me as a man.

Also offensive to me are the alleged jokes that the inexplicably popular Irish so- called comedian Tommy Tiernan came out with in the last few days.

Even worse, if that's possible, it wasn't even in the context of his "hilarious" stage show, but in a questions and answers piece after the Electric Picnic Festival.

I've been wondering how to write this guy's comments into a normal paper, but I'll have to go with the asterisks. This is what he came out with:

"But these Jews, these f****** Jew c***** come up to me. Christ killing b*******.

"F******* six million? I would have got ten or twelve million out of that. No f******* problem. F**** them.

"Two at a time, they would have gone. Hold hands, get in there. Leave us your teeth and glasses".

One of the few politicians that I have any time for, the Fine Gael T.D. Alan Shatter, who is himself Jewish said: "He has quite clearly brought to the surface his own prejudices.

"Rather than this being a comic presentation, it sounds more like the deranged and demented ramblings of a complete fool."

I skate on thin ice myself sometimes, but that's because I'm trying to make a point; but this guy? I just don't get him and I sure as hell don't get what was funny about that.

Did he ever visit the Anne Frank museum? I know that he is human so could he possibly have done that and walked out without tears for such terrible waste? I doubt it.

And yes, I'm aware that I do cause offence at times.

Sometimes for the strangest reasons.

Most journalists who knew the details of Olympic champion Darren Sutherland's tragic suicide last week decided not to mention that in initial reports. I did the same thing myself simply because I had no idea at the time if his parents knew the details.

Sure, it is your job to put down what you know but in this case it was something that his family might have needed time to come to terms with.

Now that it is out there, I still would not have written about this enormously talented man in any other way.

Of course, the issue of suicide should be addressed but in the name of humanity should we not let the immediate family come to terms with their awful loss first?

I thought that Barry McGuigan put it well when he said: "Darren was a phenomenal talent. He represented his country with pride as an amateur and I believe that he would have become a world champion."

We'll probably never know what was going through Darren's head, so I truly don't think that we should pour out word after word on it.

A young and gifted, and by all accounts fabulous personality felt that there was no way out for him.

Let's leave it at that.

Before I go, did anyone see the increasingly thin-skinned Brain Cowan debating the other day? I don't remember a thing he said as was so focussed (like Junket John) on his bald patch. All I could think of was why didn't Brain Lenihan give him a loan of his wig?

And I hope to see you all again next week, if they haven't had me committed.

Same bat-time!

Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net