Humour in the Prison: Brendan Behan Confesses

Abstract

The essay explores the comical aspects of Behan’s autobiographical writings. It focuses on how humour, especially black humour, often flourishes wherever we find conflicts and contrasts. Humour is always born out of oppositions, and it can be argued that it always functions as an act of resistance to outside tragedy. Brendan Behan, a writer of slum and working class background, is one of the leading Irish prison writers. He is in many ways an exponent of an Irish republican tradition based on the idea of prison endurance. Given Behan’s notoriously flamboyant personality and his own talking gifts, it is not hard to imagine that the worst aspect of prison confinement might have been for him compulsory solitude and silence. His exuberant language and larger-than-life personality can be considered perhaps as a reaction to such partial deprivation of interpersonal relationships during his youth. In this context, where fictional and autobiographical truth are kept apart by an unstable divide increased by the abundance of comical interludes and jokes, the core of the essay analyses the second chapter of Confessions of an Irish Rebel in order to discuss the way in which Behan alternates funny accounts and tragedy in his own autobiographical reports.