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Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland

Fun

Everything is quantifiable in America.

And everything has its place on a chart. You are not just a coach; you are the winningest coach. Or you might be the losingest. We don’t have these words in Ireland, and if we ever do I am killing myself and my dog. In fact maybe I’ll just kill lots of pets. So I can be the killingest.

And as we’ve mentioned before, you are not simply a player who had a great game of much value, awkward as it is to quantify, you are the Most Valuable player. It’s official, and here are the statistics to prove it.

Once upon a time in New Mexico I passed an unremarkable looking building with a sign outside. Turns out the building was remarkable after all, for it was the third-highest two-storey building in the State. I looked up at the building with awe. Not too much awe though for I had to hold that back in case I might see the second-highest two-storey building in the State.

Are there State height charts for every kind of storied building in the US? And national rankings?

On the radio once I heard a DJ ask of a famous painting where exactly it ranked in the list of the world’s greatest paintings. He knew the Mona Lisa was the best, but was this the second best? Or the sixth? It’s definitely top ten, right?

But then this is a world where people aren’t famous, with their fame and its merit to be debated, they are in an official Hall of Fame, presumably holding their five-gallon bucket of fame. And new movies aren’t popular or so-so; they come in at number eight in the Box Office charts with $3.5 million.

So it’s no great surprise that there are attempts to measure fun. And that’s why some things in America are funner than others, and top of the charts of fun is the funest.

In Ireland however, as it once was in America, fun is a noun. Like misery. And mirth. Therefore, things in Ireland are often so so, and sometimes they’re so funny, but never are they “so fun”. Not even if you mix mirth in with misery.

If you were to tell people in the Midwest that you spent a fortnight skiing across an ice cap, where you lost a huge chunk of weight, your best friend, and two of your favourite toes, they would likely exclaim, Oh how fun!

Now if you were then to reply, Will you be planning on doing it yourself then? The answer would be something like, Oh I could never do that; I only get three days holidays a year. At which point you should exclaim, Oh how misery!, with some degree of mirth.

This is because the expression How fun! actually means You appear to have had an amount of fun I can’t quantify, so I certainly won’t be doing it. And it works for all cases. Here are some typical examples of what might provoke the expression How fun!:

  • I met Mad Milly yesterday for a chat in the Irish cafe.
  • I saw the 268 bus which I’d never seen before, so I got on it.
  • Nuala took us for Irish-blackened chicken and periwinkles.
  • On Tuesday night we stayed in the Irish pub until 9:11pm.
  • I called Seamus last night and he said he was fine.

This is because fun is dangerous. And it needs to be measured so carefully that it even includes travel time. In Ireland if you go out, you go out, and you probably won’t start having fun until some time after you meet up with people. It’s social. And social events have a natural rhythym with a natural end that peters out with everybody satisfied. Give or take missing the NiteLink.

In America on the other hand you are on the clock. If you leave your home and go to another, two hours of conversation later, and maybe a glass or two of wine, you will find that, while you were thinking you were just starting to have fun, unknown to you, you have in fact had two and a half hours of fun (travel time included). When this gets to four hours, bearing in mind you have more travel time of fun to get home, not to mention negotiating the fun police and their roadblocks, well the amount of fun is unbearable and must be stopped.

I have never heard anybody in Ireland say that they have had five hours of fun, but if they did it would be as a reason to continue, not to stop. We might be a guilty nation, but so long as we’re not happy, we can have as much fun as we like.

In the midwest however fun is so poisonous that it can never happen two nights in a row, and you should not suggest such a thing. But we had fun last night! And should you find yourself having two nights of fun in the same week, then you may not have any more fun in that week. There are no loopholes. No Stephen’s Days, and no Hogmanays.

This is because in America, fun being quantifiable in hours, the concept of too much fun exists. I think it actually means you risk death with a smirk frozen onto your face. Oh, that’s too much fun.

For a brief period Ireland herself did something that seemed like quantifying fun. The craic, a term stolen from the English and then Gaelicized, is usually good or sometimes great, but for while in the 1970s it could even be 90. This referred to a notional speed nobody had a vehicle that could reach.

But Ireland as we know has changed. Converting 90 mph to kilometers gives you 144 kph. However because now everybody can and does actually drive at that speed, strictly speaking the craic should be something like the notional speed of 174. Even in the Isle of Man.

Be aware though. Too much fun kills.

See Also:
    • A Kansas City Phone Call To An Irish Mother
    • Temperatures
    • Titanic Museum in Missouri

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 3:10 pm and is filed under 1-eolai, Ireland & USA: Differences. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.