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I worked for years at the Irish Echo back in New York City. I was in the literary criticism racket then, but, highbrow or no, there aren't a lot of "Paddy" jokes I haven't heard.
An example:
Paddy's been at the pub drinking all night and the barkeep finally says the bar is closed. So he stands up to leave and he falls flat on his face. He figures he'll crawl outside and get some fresh air, and maybe that will sober him up.
Once outside, Paddy stands up and, again, falls flat on his face. So he crawls home and, at his front door, he stands up and, boom, falls flat on his face. He crawls through the door and up the stairs and, upon finally reaching his bed, tries one more time to stand up. He falls right into the bed and falls sound asleep.
He awakens the next morning to find his wife standing over him, a scowl on her face, shouting at him.
"So you've been drinking again!"
"How'd you know?" he asks.
"The pub called, and you've left your damn wheelchair there again!"
The Irish probably do a lot to encourage this sort of thing themselves. The great tenor Tommy Makem even made an album called "Irish Songs of Drinking and Rebellion." I'm sure there's some Brit propaganda involved as well, since anyone who's spent any time drinking with Europeans at all will tell you the Irish go to sleep like babies compared to the Brits, and either race looks positively weak-hearted next to the Russians who, for the sake of propriety, we'll just say are drunk all the time.
I remember a long time ago, though, when I was working for one of the greatest newspapermen I've ever seen. It was the day after St. Pat's, and he speculated that March 18 was probably the likeliest "call-in-sick day" of any on the calendar. He directed me to check it out.
And so I did.
I started out with Mick Maloney, who at that time owned the local steel plant. I called him up and his secretary sounded a bit under the weather.
"Hi, Lisa, this is Mike Hudson. Is Mick there?" I said.
"Mr. Hudson, he's not in yet," she answered, by way of blowing me off.
"Well, when is he expected?"
"We're not expecting him. He called and said he didn't feel well," she replied.
My mistake, I thought, was calling on Maloney, a lace-curtain Irishman I'd been singing songs with at Joe Hand's bar the previous evening. Heck, we had plenty of Jewish and Italian business owners, to say nothing of the ubiquitous WASPS, who I could call to get to say something derogatory about the Irish and, thus, put me in solid with the Boss.
Young and inexperienced, so I was. I called the next number in my Rolodex, a cellophane magnate named Jack Stein, and tried again to get the scoop. Jack had come from New York, employed 350 people, and he'd have the goods on how many of those slackers called in sick, I thought.
"What time are you expecting him?" I asked the secretary. I was dumbfounded when she said she wasn't expecting him at all. Jack used to take a snowmobile in when there was a blizzard so he could bust his guys' chops when they called in and said they couldn't make it.
"He'll be wrapped up in meetings all day, Mike," she said.
Right.
I rang up Augie Badalamenti, who owned a pizza place, a dry cleaners, a shoe store and the men's tailor shop in town.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Badalamenti won't be in today," his girl told me on the phone.
I had some comp time coming and now, around noon, I was feeling a little green around the gills myself. I filled out the form.
I had to tell the Boss I'd failed in his quest for a story, which was never a pleasant thing. On the other hand, it was the first time I truly realized that, in America, everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day.