Last week Saturday Night Live aired a sketch celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. The premise of the sketch was that it was one of those dating shows from the 1980’s where they pick a a person and put three people of the opposite sex behind a partition and they are asked questions and answer them with suggestive puns and corny pre-written jokes.
This was an Irish dating show called Kiss Me I’m Irish. The week’s host, Bill Hader, played the man looking for a date, and he began asking questions to the three women. He soon realized that one of the three women was his cousin, and he found this to be a real turn on, as did she.
A bit later, he realizes that another woman is also his cousin, and the joke is repeated over and over about the cousins wanting to have sex with each other.
I found this weird, because Irish people aren’t really known for having sex with their cousins.
Certainly not compared to evangelical Christians or people in the countries of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, where, varying by region, marrying your cousin is incredibly common and a totally accepted practice.
Indeed, it is estimated that ten percent of marriages worldwide are between first or second cousins. Outside of a few “travelers”, virtually none of these couples are Irish. In Pakistan it is estimated that over fifty percent of marriages are between cousins.
My first thought was, this sketch is stupid, and cheap, because the Irish are the only ethnicity that you’re permitted to make fun of anymore.
Then, before I went down the whole “reverse racism” route, I thought about it some more.
Making the cousin fuckers Irish added an element of absurdism to the sketch. If it were too on the nose and featured trailer trash people wanting to fuck their cousins or Pakistanis wearing turbans and wanting to fuck their cousins, it wouldn’t have been funny. 
The reason it’s sort of funny is because everyone knows Irish people, by and large, don’t fuck their cousins.
People often miss the mark when analyzing comedy.
They’ll say something like “Oh, so it’s okay for black comedians to make fun of white people, but when a white comedian makes fun of black people, that’s not going to fly.”
That’s true, it is not going to fly 99 times out of a hundred, but its not due to censorship or some unwritten rule of comedy or political correctness.
The reason a guy who looks like Billy Baldwin is not going to succeed going up on stage and making fun of black people or middle eastern people is that the audience won’t laugh.
They won’t not laugh out of ideology or conviction or politeness or for any other reason that they will not find it funny.
They will find it mean spirited and the weight of the situation will be palpable to everyone in the room, and the comedian will immediately start walking it back.
There are obvious exceptions to this, but it is 99 percent true.
As I began watching the sketch it struck me in that moment of wanting to, momentarily, just as a thought exercise, play the white victim card, that being one of the last groups that can be openly made fun of is a great privilege, meaning, its a sign that that group has prospered.
The spectacle of St. Patrick’s Day is totally ridiculous. People drink green beer, dress as leprechauns, and vomit on the street. The whole “drinking too much” stereotype about Irish people is undeniably accurate. Yet, we all know a host of stereotypes about various groups that are undeniably accurate. Clearly it would be considered in bad taste to celebrate Martin Luther King Day by cooking fried chicken and playing basketball, or to celebrate Cinco de Mayo by staging mock gang fights and eating large portions of beans, but that’s the point.
Try, as a white comedian, doing a joke about fried chicken on Martin Luther King Day.
It will bomb, because, as stated, the audience will have an intrinsic sense that something is not quite right about this situation. Even a conservative audience. Unless you’re playing an alt-right Proud Boys circle jerk in the bowels of a Cracker Barrel, it will kill the energy in the room, even if it’s well crafted.
So, my thought about the Irish was, as a group, you aren’t able to be ruthlessly mocked and completely escape the realm of political correctness until you have very few problems compared to other groups.
Until you’ve, after a decent amount of it in the past, overcome oppression and hatred and triumphed in the face of it.
So, what I’m saying is, I hope that one day we can savagely make fun of every group in America just like we do the Irish.