Politics & Power Quote by Brendan Behan

Behan’s line lands like a barstool punchline and leaves a bruise you keep probing with your tongue. Calling nationality a possession - something other people "have" - he frames Irishness and Jewishness as conditions that "have" you. The provocation isn’t just insult-comedy; it’s a savage diagnosis of histories so saturated with exile, colonization, persecution, and forced self-invention that identity stops being civic and becomes psychological weather: always present, shaping every conversation, every posture, every joke.

The word "psychosis" is doing double-duty. On the surface it’s outrageous hyperbole, a comic escalation that flatters Behan’s persona: the hard-drinking, hard-seeing dramatist who won’t treat nationhood like a respectable dinner topic. Underneath, it hints at a real pathology produced by political trauma. Irishness in the mid-century wasn’t merely passport and parish; it was the afterimage of famine, British rule, civil war, and the grinding performance of cultural authenticity demanded by both empire and nationalism. Jewishness, especially in the post-Holocaust era, carried an even sharper edge: survival as identity, identity as vigilance.

Behan also smuggles in a bleak compliment. A "psychosis" implies obsession, and obsession implies intensity: a people forced into constant self-scrutiny, contradiction, and storytelling just to stay coherent. That’s why the line works as subtext for his theatre. It’s an argument that some identities are forged less by borders than by pressure - and that the resulting humor is not decoration but a coping mechanism, a way of turning historical catastrophe into something you can say out loud.