Ethnic Jokes: Mocking the Working Irish Woman Winning Essay, Journal of Victorian Culture Graduate Essay Prize 2021.

The figure of the laughably ignorant Irish maid was one of the most recognizable Irish stereotypes in Anglo-American print culture over the late nineteenth century. Jokes about ‘Bridget’ and ‘Biddy’ crossed the Atlantic in both directions, contributing to a transnational repository of comic Irish tropes. While the cultural representation of Irish immigrants was often shaped by regional concerns, Irish servant gags were comparable, and at times identical, across locations – an indication of just how interlinked domestic sensibilities were in England and the United States. Ethnic humour of this kind partly reflected the prevalence of anti-Irish sentiment, echoing older anti-Irish caricatures. The class and racial biases revealed by transatlantic depictions of the Irish is stressed in the existing literature on Irish diaspora history, and certainly such biases help to explain many of the jokes told about servants. This essay moves beyond these perspectives, however, in arguing that comic representations of domestic service also spoke to the anxiety of the middle and upper classes reliant on external help to maintain household order, an intricate endeavour in the context of elaborate Victorian domestic protocols. The huge volume of social commentary devoted to the so-called servant question over these years was a marker of the discomfort felt by employers about managing domestic labour, and joking about the com-petence of maids and cooks was one means of alleviating some of the tensions prompted by servant-keeping.

without attribution, in the London newspaper Bell's New Weekly Messenger. 2 The process by which it came to England cannot be retraced, but it was most likely taken from a shipment of newspapers imported by one of the transatlantic lines. By this period, steamships could cross the ocean in as little as 14 days, and the news carried on board was widely relayed by the press on arrival. 3 Less pressing but still pervasive was the trend of reproducing American newspaper jokes, particularly those concerned with the problems of domestic employment. Once a snappy servant gag had reached English shores, it had the potential to find audiences all over the nation. The joke quoted above, for instance, went on to feature in at least 44 more publications, the last recorded appearance being in Oxford's Banbury Advertiser on 30 March 1939. It continued to circulate widely in the United States, too, with 25 regional newspaperscovering areas as diverse as Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Louisiana and Hawaii -reprinting it in the years up to 1880. One comic anecdote could thus remain intelligible to audiences across a broad temporal and geographic terrain.
While Irish immigrants were far more prevalent in the American domestic service sector, Irish servant jokes proliferated in print culture in England as well as the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. 4 The figure of the clumsy Irish maid was one of the most recognisable Irish stereotypes in Anglo-American print culture, with jokes about 'Bridget' and 'Biddy' crossing the Atlantic in both directions. Such humour was part of a transatlantic cultural exchange facilitated by so-called scissors-and-paste journalism, contributing to a shared repository of comic Irish tropes. As Bob Nicholson has written, in publishing imported snippets along with their own content, newspapers and magazines of the period forged a space in which national boundaries were broken down and cultures entangled. 5 While the cultural representation of Irish women was often shaped by regional concerns over Irish immigration and politics, Irish servant jokes were comparable, and at times identical, across locations. This might strike some as surprising, considering the differences in how Irishness was perceived in the two countries. American representations of the Irish certainly reflected discomfort over their growing political and economic strength as an immigrant community, but there was usually a more bluntly racist tone to discussions of the Irish in England, in line with deeply rooted English views of the Irish as inferior colonial subjects. However, on household matters, writers and employers in, say, New York could find much common ground with commentators in London, Liverpool or Manchester. Complaints were similar on both sides of the Atlantic, as were bourgeois domestic standards. Andrew Urban has pointed out that Americans and Britons at times even imagined themselves to be in a sort of class alliance, with the former admiring and drawing on British models of servant management, and the latter examining American responses to the arrival of Irish immigrants in view 2 Bell's New Weekly Messenger, 9 May 1847, p. 6. The material cited in this essay is primarily drawn from digitized print collections, allowing for a reasonably comprehensive picture of how content was copied and spread through the press. of their own struggles with the Irish. 6 Readers in both locations were regularly exposed to discussions of each other's domestic challenges -although reprinted articles were sometimes tweaked to accord with national sensitivities and vernacular practices. 7 The cross-national appeal of the ethnic jokes considered here attests to the fact that transatlantic audiences also shared a common sense of humour in regard to the travails of housekeeping.
Traditional research on Victorian representations of the Irish has tended to focus on the aggressive treatment of working-class types, citing light-hearted jokes, if at all, as colourful asides. The image of the simianized or ape-like Irishman has received particular attention as a counterpoint to constructions of the rational Saxon. The jokes discussed here cannot be considered interchangeable with such crude material, even in cases where a categorically racist illustration or commentary was evidently intended to amuse. While comic servants were primarily designed with laughter in mind, depictions of the Fenian agitator or Irish apeman shored up an explicit political agenda or ideology, using humour merely as a tool to dehumanize. 8 The portrayal of violent, irrational Celts in satirical publications such as Puck and Punch is obviously significant as an example of the base prejudice directed at the Irish during times of political ferment, but these figures performed a very different purpose to the typical Irish jokes found in the transatlantic press. Print humour built around Irish female immigrants cannot, for instance, be adequately explained by looking only to the tensions stirred up by Irish nationalism, or ethnic conflict more broadly. While indicative of popular and elite attitudes towards immigrants, Irish servant jokes could equally be a reflection of middle-class unease about modernization and rising standards of etiquette. Paying attention to these more ambiguous kinds of humour offers a new way of thinking not only about the dynamics of household service but also about the construction of transatlantic class identities.

'ST UPID' D OM E STICS
By the late nineteenth century, American and English audiences were well acquainted with jokes about the apparent uselessness of Irish servants. Much of this humour turned on blundering encounters with household products or appliances, or with modern ways of life. In newspapers, magazines and comic publications, Irish domestics were depicted as making basic mistakes due to their ignorance of bourgeois housekeeping. Needless to say, the women who left Ireland in the decades after the Great Famine of 1845-1852 mostly grew up in much more modest conditions than those in which they worked. The rural homes of the emigrating poor tended to be sparsely furnished and lacking running water or gas. Waste would have usually been emptied outside the property, and simple meals prepared on an open fire rather than on a cookstove. 9 The butt of Irish servant jokes was often a recently landed immigrant with little experience of modern urban life. In one widely printed 1870s gag, a New York family 6 Andrew Urban, 'Irish Domestic Servants, "Biddy" and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850-1900', Gender and History, 21 (2009. Caitriona Clear, Social Change and Everyday Life in Ireland, 1850-1922(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007 discovers that their maid, a woman not long off the boat from Ireland, has been replenishing a salad dressing container with castor oil. 10 The subject of another joke, a decade later, is sent to post a letter at a pillar-box only to return with it still in hand. 'Shure, surr, the door wis locked' , she informs her master. 11 In a related vein, a 1890s column filler tells of how an Irish domestic is instructed to wash cut-glass dishes with 'deliberation', which she assumes to be a cleaning agent, prompting her to go in search of some at a grocer's store. 12 The humour was occasionally reinforced by comic visual imagery. In an illustration run by the British comic Big Budget in 1900, for example, an Irish maid described as 'just over' is shown ringing a doorbell. 'The missis wor afther tellin' me to ring the bell for dinner', reads the caption underneath. 13 Unfamiliarity with middle-class terminology is similarly stressed in a 1908 Tatler cartoon portraying a servant who has neglected to fill her employer's carafe with water the night before. 'Sure, now, I thought a giraffe was a bird', she tells him. 14 Irish culinary abilities were an especially common target of satire. Irish immigrants figured as inept domestics in countless magazines, novels and plays, but discussions of the so-called servant problem treated Irish women's knowledge of food as a particular obstacle to the smooth running of households. 15 Comic anecdotes about kitchen gaffes provided a lighter alternative to such commentary. In an 1880s joke published on both sides of the Atlantic, an Irish cook is asked whether she has cleaned a chicken for dinner. ' As well as I could, mum, with nothing but yellow soap to clane it with' , she says. 16 Another extensively circulated snippet describes a servant's surprise on being given macaroni to prepare for the table, causing her mistress to enquire if she had cooked any at her last place. 'We used them things to light the gas with' , responds the cook. 17 Elsewhere, a domestic is found to have doused a plum pudding with paraffin after spilling the brandy she had been given to set it alight, not realizing her chosen replacement would cause a more serious fire. 18 In some instances the physical appearance of such kitchen workers was part of the humour. A Puck cartoon printed in 1905 shows a burly-looking Bridget telling her employer that she has never made lobster à la Newburgh, since she 'niver worruked farther up th' Hoodson than Nyack' . 19 The cook's physical size here is significant, given the connotations of large bodies in medical and popular culture of the era. 10 The original American source of this joke cannot be located, but it was extensively reproduced in 1873 -sometimes as part of the same series of American jokes -in provincial English newspapers including the Banbury Advertiser, Tavistock Gazette,Henley Advertiser,Alnwick Mercury,West Somerset Free Press,East Kent Gazette,Croydon's Weekly Standard,Tenbury Wells Advertiser,Witney Express,Maryport Advertiser,Alcester Chronicle,Exmouth Journal,and Thames Gazette. 11 The joke, credited to The Bailie, a Glasgow-public comic periodical, was published between 1882 and 1884 in a similarly wide range of English papers, among them the Lancaster Gazette, Rugby 16 Chicago Tribune, 17 July 1889, p. 4. The joke was still in circulation three decades on -see Missouri's Fair Play, 25 December 1920, p. 8. 17 This was widely printed between 1881 and 1910, although the original source is unclear. 18 Northern Daily Telegraph, 26 January 1900, p. 4. It appeared in several more English newspapers over the next five years.
From the late nineteenth century, as Amy Farrell has written, physicians and social commentators increasingly linked fatness to lower levels of civilization, and thinness to progress and sophistication. 20 Notions of health and beauty were intertwined with ideas about the racial inferiority of the Irish, and comic illustrations provided a ready canvas on which to illustrate and perpetuate such prejudices. As in the above example, cartoons of fat Irish servants often included a slimmer bourgeois woman as a point of contrast, the former denoting primitivity and the latter refinement.
The Irish servant as a cause of social embarrassment was another prominent theme of Irish ethnic jokes. One of the most common joke narratives -repeated in various forms over many years -describes an Irish maid revealing to a caller that their employer is avoiding visitors. In a typical example of this type of joke, a domestic is asked when the master of the house will be returning, to which she responds, 'Shure I dunno, sir; when he's in he's always 'out'' . 21 Other comic snippets poked fun at servants' appearances before household gatherings. In one such instance, a woman's attempt to mock her Irish help in front of guests ends in embarrassment for herself: 'Why, Bridget,' said a lady, who wished to rally her servant-girl for the amusement of the company, upon the fantastic ornamenting of a huge pie, 'did you do this? You're quite an artist. Pray, how did you do it?' 'Indade, mum, it was myself that did it,' replied Bridget. 'Isn't it pretty? I did it with your false teeth, mum. ' 22 Servants' supposed unguardedness also had the potential to stir up tensions between husbands and wives. In a joke printed by the British magazine Tatler, an employer tells his Irish maid to ensure a note is passed on to her mistress, to which she responds: 'Yiss, sorr, I'll just leave it in the pocket of the trousers ye've taken off. She be sure to go through them' . 23 Such disclosures, though not necessarily malicious, highlighted the perceived untrustworthiness of servants.
As working-class immigrants unschooled in the norms of bourgeois life, Irish women were regarded as a particular liability to the reputation of their employers. Well-regulated households relied on domestic staff to maintain appearances, but the social and cultural differences of Irish servants meant there was always a risk of things going wrong, of things being shown up. Domestic service humour helped to ease such tensions while also poking fun at those whose status partly depended on the smooth running of domestic life. The currents of satire could flow in two directions even in a single joke, painting an unflattering picture of servants and employers alike. Such humour certainly drew on stereotypes about immigrant workers, but it did so without suggesting that native-born employers were entitled to respect from their servants. Defining one's self against a domestic 'other' was one of the principal ways in which

• Ethnic Jokes
Victorians established a sense of elite or bourgeois status. Servant jokes provided a reminder of the fragility of this authority, demonstrating that self-importance was easily unmasked.
Employers were at times more the butt of the joke than servants. A newspaper gag with transatlantic circulation described a mistress trying to get her maid to wash her face by telling her it would make her beautiful, prompting the retort: 'Sure, it's a wonder ye never tried it, ma'am' . 24 On a different occasion, Bridget is asked what she would do if she could play the piano as well the lady of the house, to which she says she would go on learning until she could play 'decently' . 25 A male Irish servant similarly undermines his employer when the man asks if he would 'rather be a bigger fool than you look, or look a bigger fool than you are' . Pat chooses the latter, but his employer quips that that would be impossible. 'Faix, sor', replies Pat, 'whoivver shrpung that joke on yez was no liar at all at all, sor!' 26 The occasional deflection of an insult back onto the master or mistress goes to show that ethnic humour did not merely function to disparage those of another ethnicity. The target of derision in some cases was rather the arrogance or incompetence of the established middle classes. These jokes encouraged readers to laugh at employers who considered themselves superior to their servants, diminishing the notion of a natural social hierarchy in the servant-keeping household.
Other types of subversive humour centred on a servant's use of wit to justify ignoring or incorrectly carrying out work. In one popular joke, a mistress asks her maid why she failed to answer the door. 'Shure, mum, an' it never spoke to me', replies the servant. 27 Such verbal trickery was consonant with a long tradition of knowing humour in popular Victorian culture. It was a humour, as Peter Bailey has written with regard to music hall comedy, that destabilized 'the various official knowledges that sought to order common life through their languages of improvement and respectability and the intensifying grid of regulative social disciplines' . 28 Knowingness did not always make for subversive humour, in that it could fail to confront or question power, but it did at least position itself in opposition to the hegemonic discourses usually associated with the middle and upper classes. In the case of these jokes, Irish servants provided a counterbalancing force to employers' sense of entitlement without explicitly challenging their command over the domestic scene.

HU M O UR PROD UCTION
Irish servant jokes followed the same template as many of the other comic snippets that crisscrossed the Atlantic. They were usually short, and reliant on stock characters and situations. As with most of the jokes featured in humour columns of the period, they also tended to be presented in dialogue form, a standardized model that made them well-suited to mass circulation. 29 The uniformity of such material allowed it to flow easily between newspapers and magazines. By the late nineteenth century, Anglo-American publications had become prolific 24 This was printed in several English and American newspapers between 1882 and 1900. recyclers of each other's jokes, taking them either straight from imported sources or indirectly from domestic competitors. Numerous English newspapers even had columns dedicated entirely to 'Yankee' humour from the 1870s -a mark of the centrality of American media culture to British New Journalism. 30 While English humour did circulate in the United States, too, American publications were more inclined to print home-grown jokes. Newspaper staffers were sometimes assigned to write comic filler, but most jokes were the work of anonymous professional jokesmiths. Daniel Wickberg has estimated that about 15 to 20 men and women dominated the country's joke market by the 1900s, contributing the great majority of gags featured in magazines and daily publications. 31 In other instances, snippets were taken from joke books: William Harvey's 1904 collection, Irish Life and Humour, for example, included 20 pages of servant gags, many of which went on to be reprinted in English and American newspapers. 32 The widespread adoption of the humour column in both countries reflected the transatlantic emergence of popular journalism targeted at a mass readership. As Joel Wiener has observed, this was a development driven not only by the imperatives of an increasingly competitive media landscape but also by social and political changes, including growing literacy rates, new technology, and the evolution of representative forms of government. 33 Such material was thus generally published for commercial ends, and not always an expression of seriously held views.
Irish ethnic jokes nevertheless did draw on a long tradition of Anglo-Saxon prejudice, emphasizing as they did the seeming ubiquity of Irish ignorance. As is well established, the blundering Irishman was a prominent figure in English popular culture from the seventeenth century, particularly in the theatre. 34 The supposed simple-mindedness of such Irish characters -whether servants or general labourers -obviously tapped into long-established English assumptions about Ireland, seeming to justify the subordinate position of Irish people within the imperial hierarchy. Such representations 'complemented the political discourses of the time period that sought to portray Ireland as an infant in need of British rule and civilization', as Urban has argued. 35 Irish stereotypes also furnished a comforting antidote to fears of Irish insurrection. Comic Irish types were typically unreliable but easily subdued, and in that regard might be said to have dampened the threats posed by Irish politics and immigration. In addition, ethnic humour worked to differentiate the English and Irish, given both their visual likeness and physical proximity. As Laura Salisbury has argued, if we think of such humour as an assertion of superiority over an uncomfortably close 'other', it makes sense that Irish jokes would be salient in England. 36 This is not to say that the Irish were always the primary target of parody on stage and in jest-books. English humourists established 'an entire gallery of repellent national stereotypes' over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and native-born provincial types were routinely depicted as ignorant as well. 37 However, Irish stereotyping was particularly sensitive to changing political conditions, and the resurgence of Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century gave rise to many more vitriolic representations in that period.
Irish caricatures had likewise long been a mainstay of American popular culture. Although served up to audiences in England going back to the seventeenth century, Paddywhackery only really began to proliferate in American theatre from the 1840s, in line with the onset of mass immigration from Ireland. In plays and in print, Irish caricatures reflected American views of the lower-class immigrants who had landed on their shores with few, if any, resources or marketable skills. 38 Such constructions were in some instances a clear offshoot of popular anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiments, shoring up nativist critiques of the unassimilated Irish. Nineteenth-century American writers may have occasionally sympathized with the Irish national cause, but many were no more delicate than their British counterparts in drawing attention to the supposedly crude and ignorant nature of the Irish in their midst.
Like earlier Irish caricatures, Irish servant jokes of the Victorian era took shape against a background of ethnocentric prejudice. However, they also mirrored much of the humour centred on servant conduct more generally in this period. Readers in both countries appear to have been amused by servants of all ethnic backgrounds -an indication that issues of social class could be just as important to comic narratives. Native-born English domestics, for their part, had long been mocked over their dialect, their ignorance of middle-class etiquette, their physical appearance, and even their names. 39 In the United States, Chinese, Swedish and African-American servants were also prominent comic figures, providing light relief in the press along with theatre and early cinema. 40 In many instances, American humour columns featured jokes involving domestics of a range of nationalities. An 1894 issue of the New York magazine Current Literature, to give one example, collated as many as 21 servant gags from overseas as well as regional publications. The column included a joke from the San Francisco Report about Wang Hang Ho, a Chinese cook who calls his mistress by the wrong name; one from Paris Voltaire about Baptise, a servant who breaks china dishes; and another from Vienna's Kikeriki magazine about a confused maid named Betje. In most cases, though, Irish women were the butts of the joke: 'Bridget', 'Mary' or 'Irish Domestic' provided the humour in eight of the total number of 21, more than any other group. 41 Similar comic tropes were 37 David Hayton, 'From Barbarian to Burlesque: English Image of the Irish, c. 1600-1750', Irish Economic and Social History, 15 (1988. 38 Jennifer Mooney, Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865-1905(New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Peter Flynn, 'How Bridget Was Framed: The Irish Domestic in Early American Cinema, 1896-1917', Cinema Journal, 50 (2011 nevertheless applied to workers regardless of ethnicity, demonstrating the wide applicability of domestic service humour.
It was possible to participate in such humour even without experience in employing certain ethnic groups. The extent to which servant jokes diffused into oral culture is impossible to gauge, but we can surmise that a good many went on to be shared in social settings. Some lived on in public memory long after their composition, judging at least by the fact they cropped up in readers' joke competitions months or even years later. When newspapers invited members of the public to send in their best gags, previously published servant jokes were often among those submitted. An entry to the Burnley Express's weekly 'Prize Joke Competition' in February 1889, for example, tells of how an Irish maid asked to serve tea with some bacon misunderstands the instruction, instead bringing out a pot with a few rashers floating in the tea. Readers might have assumed it was the work of a local wit, but it had in fact already appeared in numerous publications, both in England and the United States. 42 Even the jokes featured in readers' columns were themselves sometimes copied. In an April 1899 submission to a 'Prize Jokes and Stories' column run by the Yorkshire paper Halifax Courier, Bridget is found polishing a fireplace area with a copy of the paper. 'I heard ye say the other day that it brightened ye up, and sure I'm trying it on the fender', she tells her bewildered mistressa punchline that won the submitter a shilling. 43 Six years later, the same lines clinched the top prize in Tatler's 'The Chestnut Tree', a weekly competition offering readers one guinea for the best short story or anecdote. 44 Some readers also tore humour columns out of newspapers for safekeeping. As Janet Theophano has documented, newspaper snippets were often pasted into recipe and cookery books of the period, and Irish servant gags have been found among several such documents. 45 Comic tropes established in the press were passed into oral culture and thus incorporated into public memory, reinforcing existing biases about Irish domestic labour.
The sharing of these jokes might have complemented anti-Irish feeling, but their retelling was not necessarily an act of prejudice or malice. When his Irish housekeeper, in the summer of 1888, declined to go see fireworks in case a fire broke out while she was gone, the poet Walt Whitman is said to have responded: That is very funny, Mary -very funny. It makes me think of a story I once heard of a Bridget whose mistress found her weeping bitterly before a roaring big fireplace. "What is the matter with you, Bridget?" asked the mistress, and Bridget, still weeping, said: "O mum, it's just this way: I might be after marrying Pat and we might have three or four children around and Oh the brats might fall into the fire and be burned to death!" That seems like you, While he saw nothing problematic in the joke, Whitman was by no means hostile to Irish female immigrants. He had written sympathetically in the past about those many women who sought household employment on their arrival from Ireland, showing a perceptive understanding of the demeaning treatment faced by prospective servants in intelligence offices. 47 As Joann Krieg has observed, Whitman also regarded the Irish at large as proof that immigrants could be assimilated into American democracy, a viewpoint informed by the advancements they had been made in cities such as New York. 48 He might have had harboured snobbish tendencies, but he at least saw Irish immigrants as having the potential to be equal to native-born Americans. The enjoyment of ethnic humour thus cannot be taken as evidence of the teller's politics.
Indeed, Irish newspapers themselves were not averse to publishing the sort of jokes popularized in the Anglo-American press. Humour centred on native Irish speakers' misunderstanding of the English language was already a large component of oral culture in Ireland, as shown by evidence gathered by the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1930s and 1940s. 49 As Seán De Fréine observes, by the late nineteenth century, many in Ireland had 'accepted the ethnocentric Ascendancy viewpoint that Irish was a backward language' . 50 Servant jokes printed in Irish publications tended, however, to emphasize displays of wit or cunning. A good many highlighted the confidence of serving women, making light of their apparent propensity to invite friends and relatives over to their employers' homes. In an illustrated gag printed by the Skibbereen Eagle in 1896, a mistress tells her Irish maid she does not want her going out that evening. 'Nayther do Patrick, mem', responds Bridget. 'He's coming to see me, mem' . 51 Others turned the joke on servant-keepers, taking down mean-spirited or arrogant employers. A 1900 gag run by the Cork Examiner, for instance, involves a domestic being ordered to stay on in her position until a new girl can be found, to which the maid responds: 'That was my intenshun, anyway. I want her to know what kind of woman ye are' . 52 The widest range of Irish servant jokes appeared in the Irish Times's weekly front-page humour column, 'Cream of Jokes', which offered readers five shillings for the best submission. The gags sent in covered more or less the same themes as similar English and American columns, telling of servants misunderstanding instructions and generally bungling their work. 53 An Anglo-Irish newspaper catering to the middle and upper classes, it generally held a paternalistic view of the Irish Catholic poor -an outlook that made these kinds of classist tropes a natural content fit. The fact that 'Bridget' gags were also circulated to Irish audiences demonstrates that they were not necessarily considered a blanket slur on the country's population. As Christie Davies has written, even individual members of an ethnic group may find amusement in ethnic jokes, given the diversity within such groups, and the fact that jokes can always be interpreted as applying to another subset of the group. 54  normative "class selves" of a capitalist elite' . 59 Whereas in earlier times manners were framed within a moral discourse, Victorian etiquette literature promoted politeness as a means of both disguising and facilitating social ambitions. 60 Such ambitions were readily discredited, however, in the presence of an unassimilated Irish immigrant. This was a risk acknowledged, among many others, by the anonymous author of an 1873 article in the New York periodical Christian Union. Discussing the intricacies of American housekeeping, the writer remarks that many a mistress 'arranges her household not as it shall best forward the business of life, but as it shall make the most effective spectacle' . It was a dishonest approach, the writer stressed, masking a falseness liable to be shown up in social gatherings. As the article put it: We would like to have it supposed that we were born to the purple, and should not be in the least discomposed on being bidden to dine at Chatsworth, having the elegance, though not the vastness, of Chatsworth under our own roof. And in comes blundering, candid Bridget, with a wrecked ambition in shape of an omelette soufflé, and unwittingly reveals to the visitor that we never had one before. It is our deep hope, as it is our conviction, that these rough-shod ministers of truth and simplicity will never cease to plague us with the pictorial exhibition of our small sins . . . until every household in the land is willing to lead a life no more showy than it can easily afford, and to attempt no difficult and unfamiliar pretences to impress visitors. 61 Here, as in many comic snippets, Irish servants represented an authenticity thought to be missing from bourgeois culture. Readers could laugh at their social gaffes because they recognized the insincerities being exposed, whether in themselves or others.
From around the turn of the century, Irish servant jokes took a new direction in also calling attention to the exploitation faced by domestics. There was an increasing recognition in these years of the need to reform the sector, both in England and the United States. The growth in opportunities available to working-class women was giving rise to widespread uncertainty about the future of service, and reports undertaken by concerned women's groups and government bodies stressed the long hours and lack of independence experienced in service. Some gags showed an awareness of these poor conditions, as in this 1900 snippet run by London's Catholic Universe: Mistress severely: 'If such a thing occurs again, Norah, I shall have to get another servant. ' Norah: 'I wish yer would, there's easily enough work fer two of us. ' 62 In a departure from most earlier ethnic humour, it is the employer who is here depicted as lazy. The overworked servant responds with a knowing wit, showing she is well aware of the injustice at play. A Harper's Bazaar joke from 1912 is even more ironic: 59 ethnicity. Making fun of those being ordered, rather than those doing the ordering, worked to minimize the extent to which bourgeois families depended on such domestic 'others' . The huge volume of social commentary devoted to the so-called servant question over these years was a marker of the discomfort felt by employers about managing domestic labour, and joking about the follies of maids and cooks could at least alleviate some of the tensions brought up by servant-keeping. The humorous anecdotes told about domestics could in this sense be more of a release valve than a political commentary, providing as they did an escape from the pressure of daily life.

DISCLOSUR E STATE M EN T
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

FUNDIN G
This research was supported by a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship from the Irish Research Council.