How Sinéad O’Connor criticised England in one swift joke
What’s the fastest liquid? Milk, because it’s pasteurised before you see it. That’s my go-to joke whenever a quick one is needed on the spot, which is more often than you might imagine. It’s speedy to deliver and avoids the annoyingly traditional opening trope of “an Englishman, Irishman, and Scot walk into a bar”. Something that usually prefaces a reductive take on a complex history, a history that Sinéad O’Connor spent her career tackling.
She was, in many ways, the ultimate punk. Scathing and eloquent in equal measures, unafraid to combat difficult political issues with intellectual dexterity that elevated her music far beyond the simple realms of anti-establishment. They were egalitarian and philanthropic, as much as they were angry and rebellious.
Who can forget her Saturday Night Live appearance in 1992, where O’Connor boldly ripped up a picture of The Pope in front of a shocked studio and televised audience to criticise the Catholic church and their child sex abuse scandals. Or on Jools Holland, where atop of a soft alternative beat, she eloquently delivered a monologue uncovering the true history of Ireland’s famine.
“OK, I want to talk about Ireland, specifically, I want to talk about the ‘famine’ – about the fact that there never really was one. There was no ‘famine’,” she sang, plain-faced without a single quiver in her voice and showing how art can be blended with bold and intelligent political activism.
Like any artist or public figure, willing to brazenly stand by her own principles, O’Connor became the butt of several media jokes. Traditionalists threatened by her truthfulness staged several personal attacks via media outlets.
So when she shaved her head in protest against stereotypical feminine ideals, she was, of course, providing bitter critics with an easy stick to beat her with. When playground accusations of nits became all too familiar, she responded, saying, “If ye all think I am such a crazy person why do ye use me to sell your papers?” later adding, “If ye wrote about Bono like you wrote about me he’d kick your asses.”
Sadly, she was a martyr for her own point. There was clearly no nuance in addressing her aesthetic decisions. Rather than acknowledging the shackles of normal society, she wished to break down, critics resorted to baseless references of “nits” in order to smear her reputation and distract audiences from the heavier issues at play within her work.
But O’Connor could, with just a few words, do what critics needed an entire page to do, and she didn’t have to resort to nits. When asked what the best Irish joke she ever heard was, she simply said, “Why are Irish jokes so silly?” to which the journalist responded, “I don’t know”.
What followed was a simple, effective and perfectly Sinéad O’Connor punchline – even if she didn’t invent it: “So the English can understand them.”
It was a joke that perfectly articulated her life in activism, operating on higher frequencies of nuance yet portraying herself with relative simplicity. In doing so, she appeased the baseless nature of critics unwilling to engage properly and thus proves her overall outlook.
