That one time I stumped John Mulaney in person (and also the historical genesis of English terror in Ireland)
A blended contemplation of personal experience and early modern scholarship—just in time for St. Patrick's Day
Preamble
Author’s Note: I’ve been a bit off schedule lately because March has been a chaotically busy month, but I’m back! Please accept my apologies for any latent typos or grammatical errors in this post. In my haste to produce this piece, I likely have been negligent.
Additionally, regarding this preamble: Trust me when I say that reason for this preamble is to illustrate that one does crazy things when they’re grieving. It’s not an excuse to ramble on old memory lane—not just, anyway.
This memory was a fun one to write about, and the historical analysis felt like getting back to my roots as an early modern scholar. If you’d like to see more writing like this, comment below or reach out to me directly.
Thank you for your patience!
Before I get into the particulars of the when, where, why, and how of stumping one of America’s most famous—and sharpest—comedians, this post begins with a bit of a downer. It was the summer of 2021, and my best friend in the whole world, my 15-year-old calico Norma Jean, shed her mortal coil suddenly and without warning one morning in May.
COVID-19 was still raging across the U.S., and I hadn’t traveled on a plane since February 2020. Life was still bleak, and for the first time, I found myself without my napping buddy, my patchworked shadow who purred nearly on command.
Suffice it to say, I was in a dark place. I needed a distraction, and I needed it fast.
Enter John Mulaney’s highly anticipated return to standup: a short-term residency at City Winery somewhere between Greenwich Village and Chelsea. Like so many habits that formed during those two years of shutdown, I had made a habit of trawling Reddit for some content—any content—to distract myself from not only the global hellscape tearing its way through hospitals but also my own quiet mourning in the wake of losing Norma Jean.
Of course, the City Winery shows sold out almost immediately, and it was crazy to think that I could somehow find tickets. Until I did. On the Reddit black market. From a reputable source (unbelievably).
The stars—or as Norma Jean would say, the chicken bones—aligned.
My eyes lit up for the first time in weeks.
“Hey, Brandon!” I low-key shouted at my spouse in the adjacent room.
Brandon: What’s up?
Me: Wanna go see John Mulaney in New York next month?
[long, extended pause]
B [with trepidation in his voice]: … Surrrreeee???
Me: I think I get can get us front row tickets to the new set he’s workshopping for not a bad a markup. If I can buy them, you wanna go?
B: If you’re not getting scammed, why the hell not.
Mind you, reader, I had my credit card’s fraud line on speed dial. But to my genuine surprise, this black-market sale turned out not, in fact, to be a scam.
We booked our flights to New York and used some long overdue Hilton Honors points to cover the hotel in Lower Manhattan. Before long, Brandon, my college friend Jay Jurden (a successful, up-and-coming comedian in his own right)1, Jay’s partner, and I were viewing the post-rehab, mid-divorce stand-up set of a man who had spiraled drastically just 8 months prior.
Stand-Up Guy
Mulaney’s set was dark, raw, and clearly very newly conceived. He came out on stage to roaring applause with a notebook in hand—which he consulted several times throughout the evening—and began to recount his failed stint in rehab the previous October, his crumbling marriage, and the dangerous lengths to which he went to score pills and coke, more pills and more coke.
Eventually, he got around to a childhood story that involved the precocious young Mulaney asking his father “why?” one too many times. I won’t spoil to context of the joke because we have yet to see what makes it to the long-anticipated Netflix special that was confirmed earlier month, but the elder Mulaney quipped in reply, “So if you ever have to dine with the Queen of England, you won’t be embarrassed.”
Mulaney let the joke land before sardonically delivering his punchline:
“Who are we kidding; I’m Irish. The only thing I’m bringing to Buckingham Palace is a bomb.”
[raucous laughter erupts from the audience]
“Everyone laughs at that joke, which is weird because it advocates terrorism.”
Mulaney had been doing this set long enough to know this joke, too, would land. He sauntered back to the stool upstage where his notebook and a bottle of water was sitting. What I mumbled under my breath stopped him in his tracks.
Sidebar: According to my friends, I am incapable of whispering quietly. I hadn’t realized this fact about myself because, well, I think I’m whispering.
One such moment occurred, when I thought I whispered:
“They [the British] started it.”
Apparently Mulaney heard me because he turned on his heels and hastily glided back downstage for more audience banter and on-the-fly jokestering. Holding the mic to up to his face, he said:
“Someone just said ‘They started it.’
He rocked back and forth on his heels, looking straight down at his feet while doing so. I could see the wheels turning. I wondered what obscure historical fact he’d lob at the audience. I was both riveted and reticent at the thought that he would embarrass me publicly.
I don’t know how to whisper, though. That’s on me.
He continued to rock on his heels and look down at his feet:
“Yeaaahhhh … I guess they did start it.”
There was a pause, and then another pause. Nope, not today. He progressed into the next part of his set without another word.
The British did, in fact, start it
But my point remains. The British, in fact, did start the hostility. And the reason I know this is because of my area of expertise in early modern literature.
The English have had a long-standing history of invading and conquering Ireland. It started in the twelfth century when the Anglo-Normans invaded the island. But overt colonial English aggression didn’t get started in earnest until the sixteenth century, when Queen Elizabeth I began putting into motion her imperial ambitions.
These ambitions were not just based in looting and conquering—though they were certainly toward the top of the list. The queen’s goal was also to wage an ideological war against Catholic heathens, as well as to compete with the Spanish’s efforts to colonize the New World.
While the Ulster Plantation Rebellion—the Irish’s landmark rebellion against the English crown—took place during King James I’s reign, the king’s efforts only maximized and escalated the brutality of his predecessor.
This milieu isn’t just tied to English royal history though; it’s also deeply entrenched within English literary history. This is where Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene and short-lived Irish plantation governor, comes into play.
As Nicholas Canny writes in his entry on Ireland in The Spenser Encyclopedia, the conquest of Ireland would:
prove altogether more arduous and expensive than Queen Elizabeth could countenance, but those soldiers and officials who had been introduced to the country … were anxious to pursue an aggressive forward policy that would present them with the opportunity to seize and develop land in areas controlled by Gaelic Irish families.2
Similar to Sirs Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, who looked to colonize the land that we now know as the state of Virginia, English soldiers in Ireland were fueled by greed and Protestant zealotry. As David Harding writtes in “Objects of English Colonial Discourse: The Irish and Native Americans”:
By the time of Elizabeth I, it had become unacceptable in the Chrisitan world for even the most powerful of sovereigns to take the lands of other peoples without some legal basis. The conquest of foreign lands required fundamental justification based on ethics.3
Hoping to capitalize on the English nationalism of the Anglo-Normans who invaded Ireland during the Middle Ages, Elizabeth as sovereign of England did what the monarchy does best: she waged a propaganda and land war against the native peoples to paint them, as barbarians and savages.
The English had found their scapegoat. Now it was time to start the process of brutalizing—in every sense of that world—the obstinate Irish.
Spenser went to Ireland in 1580—it’s one of the few sureties we have about his largely uncatalogued life—and he eventually rose to prominence in the local colonial government. Eight years later, the English poet was gifted 3,000 acres in County Cork, upon which sat Kilcolman Castle. There, he established a small colony that had as many as six households on the property at one time.
Spenser’s views on the Irish, memorialized in his notoriously violent View on the Present State of Ireland (1596), arguably set the tone for the duration of English hostility against the Irish that persists to this day.
Written as a dialogue between Irenius and Eudox, the poet-cum-colonist lays out his method of dehumanization through the voice of Irenius:
[M]oderation ought to be had in tempering and managing of this stubburn nation of the Irish, to bring them from their delight of licensious barbarisme unto the love of goodnesse and civillity.
For English colonization in Ireland to work, Irenius stresses that, above all else, the Irish need outside assistance in order to “temper[] and manag[e]” the “delight of licensious barbarisme” that plagues their “stubburn nation.” For Irenius, the English provide the healing salve of “goodnesse and civility” that can assist in such acts of “moderation.”
By this point in time, Spenser’s poetry had already become the mouthpiece of the English nation, and one can reasonably assert that his views in View were shared by the majority of the English populace.
Irenius continues that the Irish’s “delight” in barbaric behavior (“licensious barbarisme”) had become so unmanageable that instituting English laws would fall prey to their corrupting influence. Instead of “good,” the Irish “may work ill” to “pervert” the lofty goals of justice to “extreame injustice.”
Irenius continues:
The lawes themselves they do specially rage at, and rend in peces, as most repugnant to ther liberty and naturall fredome, which in ther madnesse they effect.
The “repugnant” Irish disregard the “lawes” of the English crown, which Spenser and his like would have considered universal and ordained. These acts of rebellion, this “rage,” is the “effect” of “madnesse” for the English; they are nothing more than acts of rebellion that are “repugnant” to their “liberty and naturall freedome” itself. In other words, they “rage at” and “rend in peces [pieces]” the very intention of God itself. From the English perspetive, only savages do that.
In on fell swoop, we have the foolproof recipe for how to dehumanize vulnerable populations—and then ethnically cleanse their culture and customs through colonization—all in the name of civilizing the barbarians.
I’ve written about the danger of this rhetoric before on this Substack, but what is truly outstanding here is how overt the language of dehumanization toward the Irish really is. As scholars have spent decades arguing, this is the proving ground for both British imperialism and the American slave trade from which the United States has yet to fully recover.
The Irish locals in Cork, no strangers to the English yoke of power by the time of Spenser’s governorship, joined forces with Ulster Lord Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and launched a rebellion against Spenser’s castle in 1598. (The ruins of Kilcolman still stand in County Cork to this day, and while they’re situated on private land, visitors can still see the crumbling tower in the distance.)4
The poet had no choice at that point to return to London. He died penniless in 1599. If it weren’t for his militaristic and xenophobic violence that began a long chronology of ethnic cleansing against the Irish peoples5, one might feel sympathy for the downward turn this great literary talent’s fortunes had taken.
Living Literary Histories
There’s a greater reason to my writing this Mulaney anecdote and the tense, centuries-long standoff between the English and the Irish, and it is this:
Without my graduate study of early modern literature, this incredible history of Irish subjugation and subsequent rebellion would very likely have remained unknown to me.
What scares me is that we’re on the brink of losing this tradition for good if the modern corporate university has its way.
As New York Magazine recently published in “The End of the English Major,” enrollment in humanities courses are “in free fall” and have been for years.
To be sure, the numbers here don’t lie. Enrollment has been down due to an increasingly hostile job market that ostacizes and devalues humanities graduates.
Additionally, college and university administrators—guided more by profit margins than the goal of proliferating the production of knowledge—have continued to gut departments of humanities across the country by making faculty and students do substantially more with substantially less.
Let us not forget also that a 2019 study showed how English majors end up making substantially more money than engineers in the long run. Again, numbers don’t lie.
What I find particularly disturbing in these recent trends is what we will be missing when departments are eventually shuttered for good and the English professor (already an endangered species) joins the unemployment lines.
As I have demonstrated above, the study of literature gives us a recipe for past injustices and allows us to figure out solutions to similar issues in the present and anticipate further dehumanization in the future.
My question is: What’s lost when there is no one left to teach these lessons? When will the capitlist-driven needs of the university completely outstrip the ideals of access to knowledge, the liberal pursuit of knowledge, and the idea of a modern—dare I say it civilly engaged—citizen?
Perhaps the goal is to create a population that doesn’t object when the state enacts violence against innocent vulnerable populations. Perhaps that’s what the capitalists and their cronies in Washington have been aspiring to all along.
And getting more successful by the day. Jay Jurden is a staff writer for John Stewart’s new Apple TV show The Problem with John Stewart, has won several awards, and was named as one of “10 Comics to Watch” by Variety Magazine in 2022. Follow his Instagram here and his Twitter here.
Nicholas Canny, “Ireland, the historical context,” Spenser Encylopedia, pp. 404-407, 404.
David Harding, “Objects of English Colonial Discourse: The Irish and Native Americans,” Nordic Irish Studies, vol. 4 (2006): 37-60, 37.
I had the opportunity to visit County Cork in 2022 and saw the castle myself. I’ll be writing about it in the future, so watch this space!
For an incredibly well-researched, in-depth deep dive about this ethnic cleansing, see the four-part podcast episode of Behind the Bastards, hosted by Robert Evans, called “That Time Britian did a Genocide in Ireland.”