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Pregnancy, comedy and the female

body in Roddy Doyle's The Snapper
a
Lynne Crook
a
University of Liverpool
Published online: 03 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Lynne Crook (2012) Pregnancy, comedy and the female body in Roddy Doyle's
The Snapper, Comedy Studies, 3:2, 161-175

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 COST 3 (2) pp. 161–175 Intellect Limited 2012

Comedy Studies
Volume 3 Number 2
© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/cost.3.2.161_1
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Lynne Crook
University of Liverpool

Pregnancy, comedy and the

female body in Roddy Doyle’s
The Snapper

Abstract Keywords
The early 1990s in the Republic of Ireland saw the beginnings of huge social and comedy
economic changes, which continued to shape and change the country throughout the gender
decade and into the early twenty-first century. The Snapper ([1990] 1998) exam- Irish
ines the effects of these social changes on a working-class community and, more northern
specifically, on young women through the protagonist, Sharon Rabbitte. The atti- novel
tudes of society and her own family towards Sharon, and the physical reality of Bakhtin
her pregnancy are mediated through the form of comedy. This mediation shows eco
the attitudes of the society and comedy itself as deeply ambivalent, caught between Doyle
impulses of change and the status quo and in constant dialogue with the forces
around them.

Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper ([1990] 1998), the second of his Barrytown trilogy
of novels (sandwiched between The Commitments ([1988] 1998) and The Van
([1991] 1998), was published at a time of huge upheaval in the Irish Republic.
Set in the working-class community of Barrytown, the trilogy presents
social changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Republic dealt with

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 Lynne Crook

an increasing secularization at the same time as economic uncertainty. The

Snapper chronicles the pregnancy of Sharon Rabbitte, the eldest daughter of
the family at the centre of all three novels and the attitude of her family and
immediate society to her unmarried status. This article will examine the emer-
gence of the female body in the text through Sharon’s pregnancy and the
use of comedy by the family in responding to this situation, with reference to
Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival.
Women’s identity in the Republic of Ireland has long been at the mercy
of outside forces. As Edna Longley argues, the link between church and
state included a concentration on legislating sexual behaviour and conse-
quently, female independence: ‘Church-state politics also bring feminism
into the foreground, since control over women’s minds and bodies is central
to the argument’ (1994: 34). The figure of ‘woman’ has also been used as
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a representation of the national psyche, for example, the homely ‘colleen’

of Eamon de  Valera’s vision of the Republic. Perversely, as this image was
widely used, the actual public power of women was stripped away following
independence. The hold of the church on the law of the land and by exten-
sion on the body female as well as the body politic, was considerable. As Ní
Dhomhnaill says:

There is a psychotic splitting involved where, the more the image of

woman comes to stand for abstract concepts like justice, liberty, or
national sovereignty, the more real women are denigrated and consigned
barefoot and pregnant to the kitchen.
(1996: 16)

Similarly, women in Classical comedy, as well as in many later formal comic

forms (such as sitcom) seem to exist as a ‘prize’ and a foil for the real comedic
business. As Scott suggests, the female body acts ‘as the reward that awaits
the hero, or in jokes as the primary locus of taboo, an imaginative source
for the proliferation of obscene and visceral humour that focuses on sexual
attributes’ (2005: 97). This article will argue The Snapper is an attempt to show
the female body as an extension of a full female character who speaks and
jokes from and about the body, regaining ownership of her physical being in
a society which prefers to mask its full reality. That is not to say that this is
an unproblematic aim. There are issues of the treatment of Sharon’s baby’s
conception, as well as the fact of this being a male authored text, but the main
complexity seems to lie with the use of a deeply ambivalent comedy to fulfil
this project.
The notion of ambivalent comedy also helped to provide one of the build-
ing blocks of ‘Irish Studies’ in Vivian Mercier’s The Irish Comic Tradition
(1962). Mercier saw the comic as providing a route back to an Ireland before
the colonial expansion of its neighbour, with its roots in the true Gaelic tradi-
tion of the country. As such, the comic could provide a resistance to the sites
of the national psyche that were most mythologized by the strict morals of the
church: sex and death. Mercier outlines two types of comedy which he relates
to these tropes:

Whereas macabre humour in the last analysis is inseparable from terror

and serves as a defence mechanism against the fear of death, grotesque
humour is equally inseparable from awe and serves as a defense mechanism

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 Pregnancy, comedy and the female body in …

against the holy dread with which we face the mysteries of reproduction.
Oversimplifying, I might say that these two types of humour help us to
accept death and belittle life.
(1962: 48–49, original emphasis)

This tension between laughing at death (or its possibility) and also exploding the
‘holy dread’ that surrounds reproduction can certainly be seen in The Snapper.
Mercier’s project of finding an origin for this comedy in the Gaelic past
frequently runs the risk of seeing Ireland and its comedy as hermetically sealed
from modern influences. The Snapper, however, is emphatically concerned
with the modern and with change. While Mercier saw comedy as a link to the
past, Dixon and Falvey see the explosion of Irish comedy in the 1990s as an
expression of the economic boom and emergence of a new Ireland, as ‘part
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of the new national self-confidence, which comes partially from economic

security, but also from the general opening up of Ireland, coming out from
decades under a cloud of religious, social, sexual and economic oppression’
(1999: 7). The Snapper was published just before the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic
upturn, but glimmers of the move away from the church-dominated religious
and social oppression can certainly be seen in the novel.
The work of Mikhail Bakhtin in Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaya
kul’tura srednevekov’ya i Renessansa/Rabelais and His World ([1965] 1984)
reflects the work of Mercier closely. However, in its concentration on litera-
ture born at a time in which the prevailing authoritarian structures (of both
the church and state) are in question, it seems more in tune with the social
context of The Snapper. As Holquist says, ‘both Rabelais and Bakhtin knew
they were living in an unusual period, a time when virtually everything taken
for granted in less troubled ages lost its certainty, was plunged into contest
and flux’ ([1965] 1984: xv). Bakhtin, like Mercier, identifies the ‘grotesque’ as
a specific form of humour within the wider tropes of ‘carnival’, but links its
images of reproduction and death to a force which questions the prevailing
status quo and presses to destabilize this: ‘All the symbols of the carnival
idiom are filled with this pathos of change and renewal, with the sense
of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities’ ([1965] 1984: 11).
Unlike the work of Mercier, which sees comedy and grotesque as a linear
tradition, Bakhtin’s understanding links this specifically to insurgence, revo-
lution and change, as a response to any idea of ‘fixity’ and hierarchy, ‘these
images are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity,
to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook’
([1965] 1984: 3).
The emergence of the grotesque body within the text of The Snapper
through Sharon’s pregnancy is not an unproblematic process. In Bakhtin’s
model, the ‘essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is,
the lowering of all that high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the
material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their of indissoluble unity’
([1965] 1984: 19–20). Sharon’s pregnancy is not a sanitized miracle, but a
painful and inelegant process, as shown by her repeated use of the phrase,
‘Me uterus is beginnin’ to press into me bladder’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 208).
Throughout the novel, this view is in tension with the more traditional idea
of the female body as an idealized figure. This can be closely linked with the
church’s view of the female body and its fetishization of the Virgin Mary. In
this model, conception and birth are the products of a ‘miracle’, not to be

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linked to sex or the unpleasant and potentially life-threatening possibilities

of pregnancy. Ignorance around sexual matters that this ‘miracle’ creates and
the discomfiture is clear in the novel. As Graham Norton says in relation to
Irish attitudes to announcing a pregnancy ‘there is an embarrassment about
going home to your mother and saying “I’m pregnant” even if you’re married
and everything is fine. It’s still disgusting and – I’m so sorry and, yes, we did,
we did’ (Norton, in Dixon and Falvey 1999: 215, original emphasis). Sharon’s
pregnancy is often depicted through a positive use of the comic, relating
back to the Bakhtinian medieval grotesque that reacts against the still linger-
ing conservative values of the society that Sharon finds herself in. However,
this depiction is in constant dialogue with the church’s view of the body as
closed and complete, and birth as a terrifying perversion of the social and
physical norm.
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As well as the tension between these two types of comedy, or to term it

another way, the success or failure of comedy to resist the forces of repro-
duction and death, there is a tension between the possibility of actual, posi-
tive revolution and an allowed, temporary, ultimately redundant revolution.
The Rabbitte family lie at what is presented as a crossroads in Irish society.
As the country becomes more open, potentially richer and less regulated,
the Rabbitte family find it both liberating and terrifying. Bakhtin clearly sees
the comic which lies at the root of his ‘carnival’ as an expression specifi-
cally allied to the lower classes and which exists as their form of expression,
opposed to the higher orders: ‘All the comic forms were transferred, some
earlier and others later, to a nonofficial level. There they acquired a new
meaning, were deepened and rendered more complex, until they became
the expression of folk consciousness of folk culture’ ([1965] 1984: 6). While it
is clear that the comic is an integral part of the expression of the Rabbitte
family, the implicit resistance to the higher orders (and the moral strictures
they impose) contained in the statement by Bakhtin are not so clear-cut
within the novel.
In Sharon’s case, these moral strictures relate to her as an unmarried
mother which, even in the changing times of 1990s Ireland, was a matter for
social comment. Sharon’s pregnancy, and her determination to have and keep
her baby, is clearly linked to the carnival drive towards positively challeng-
ing social mores. As Peach argues, ‘Sharon’s illegitimate pregnancy turns the
Rabbitte household into a site of carnival that challenges other members of
the community, who are unveiled by their reactions to Sharon’s condition’
(2004: 154). However, as much as the Rabbittes enact a resistance to moral
judgements of Sharon, they also experience feelings of shame and public
humiliation. This appropriation of a positive carnival is not straightforward,
even for the family.
In his essay ‘The frames of comic freedom’, Umberto Eco points out
that for any carnival to have real impetus, the authority of the prevail-
ing mores has to be accepted, otherwise comedy can have no effect: ‘One
must know to what degree certain behaviors [sic] are forbidden, and must
feel the majesty of the forbidding norm, to appreciate their transgression’
(1984: 6). Comedy has, in more general terms that are linked to Bakhtin,
been accused of being used as a form of social regulation as well as resist-
ance. The earliest formal types of comedy based in Greek theatre (and later
adopted in Shakespearian comedy) are usually founded on restoring society
back into order and bringing wrong-doers to justice. As Martin suggests,
‘Error is corrected in comedy, transmuted in tragedy’ (1974: 80). The task of

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changing the world is down to the serious business of tragedy, not comedy.
Nevertheless, even while acknowledging the conservative force of comedy,
critics such as Critchley point out the inherently destabilizing possibilities
of the actions required to produce laughter: ‘Humour defeats our expec-
tations by producing a novel actuality, by changing the situation in which
we find ourselves’ (2002: 1). There is a constant movement in the novel
between the Rabbitte’s use of comedy as a positive resistance and its use
against them as a form of social approbation, with comedy even being used
between members of the family against each other as a way of retaining the
‘status quo’. Despite the attempts by critics like Mercier and some of his
followers to make Ireland a space for an idealized use of comedy as wholly
inclusive  – ‘In Irish comedy the function of the laughter is non-corrective’
(Krause 1982: 123) – it is clear in The Snapper that comedy can also be used
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to control and ostracize.

As well as the reaction of wider society to Sharon’s pregnancy, the reac-
tions of her family and the traditional gender roles of the family are also
investigated. The main figure that this centres on, apart from Sharon, is
Jimmy Sr (her father). Jimmy Sr struggles with the threat caused to his role
as head of the family and also his social status outside the home by the
aberrant behaviour of his eldest daughter. However, this is countered by
his role as an essentially generous and open character. Jimmy is often the
leader of the comic carnival throughout the three Barrytown novels. In The
Snapper, Sharon’s pregnancy also acts as a rebirth for him and he comes
to a new knowledge and understanding of both his daughter and his wife,
Veronica.
Unlike Jimmy and Sharon, Veronica remains as an outwardly relatively
stable character. She seems to fulfil the traditional Irish role of the mother as
the figure who instils traditional morals into the children. However, as the
book progresses it becomes clear that Veronica also represents a more low-
key resistance to social pressures. She reveals a knowledge of the body during
Sharon’s pregnancy that she has previously kept hidden and no amount of
‘morality’ makes her abandon Sharon, regardless of Veronica’s own private
misgivings about the situation. As a counterpoint to Jimmy Sr, Veronica’s
usually serious and sensible demeanour only makes her occasional forays into
the comic more surprising.
As the eldest daughter, Sharon inherits some of these traits from her
mother. However, she also represents a transition between an old and newer
order. Ostensibly, Sharon appears to be a very modern young woman. She
holds down her own (badly paid) job and ultimately makes her own deci-
sions about whether to have her baby. Just as in the case of Jimmy Sr and
his male friends, Sharon and her girlfriends communicate through jokes and
‘slagging’ to the point that it is a social necessity: ‘Jackie had come in with
the big news: she’d broken it off with Greg. So they’d had to spend the rest
of the night slagging Jackie and tearing Greg apart. It’d been brilliant crack’
(Doyle  [1990] 1998: 181). While she is pregnant, Sharon clearly does not
turn into the archetypal Madonna. She continues to work and also to go out
drinking with her friends. While not medically sound, she appears as a figure
of carnival, drinking, vomiting and reproducing while laughing at all of it:
‘Sharon couldn’t stop laughing. Her hand shook when she poured the Coke
in on top of the vodka’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 329).
In this manifestation, Sharon and her girlfriends are a powerful unit. They
use comedy as a means of power over males, as seen in Jackie’s treatment of

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a young barman at their local pub: ‘Howyeh, Gorgeous, said Jackie. Did yeh
make your holy communion yet?’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 196). It is clear that
their joking highlights an apparent sexual control (almost all of these jokes are
at the expense of the barman’s physical immaturity and lack of experience)
and is deliberately phrased by the girls to reject any ideas of the ‘ladylike’, as
is their immoderate laughter. As Scott argues, ‘laughter shatters the illusion of
women as quiet and poised and reveals them as fearfully bodily and biological
creatures’ (2005: 100).
Despite this carnivalesque treatment of Sharon’s pregnancy and the girl’s
use of sexual innuendo, the friends can generally only refer to the functions
of their own bodies through comedy. It bonds them as a group of women, as
they speak apparently openly:
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–Are you havin’ your periods or somethin’?

–Yeah, I am actually. Wha about it?
–You’re stainin’ the carpet.
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 196)

However, this also echoes critics of Bakhtin’s positive view of the body, as
in Critchley’s work when he asserts, ‘the body that is the object and subject
of humour is an abject body-estranged, alien, weak, failing’ (2002: 51). The
fact that the body is alien and estranged is clear; the group of girls are alien-
ated by a serious, medical view of the body, which Sharon reports to them
from her visits to the doctor and automatically make a joke of it: ‘“Menstrual
history”, said Jackie. “I got a C in that in me Inter”’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 214).
In his research into the changing sexual attitudes in young people in Ireland,
Michael O’Connell notes that embarrassment and ignorance were still in
evidence in the early twenty-first century, ‘I observed a conversation between
a number of “progressive-minded” Irish and Dutch young people – when the
topic turned to sexual matters, the Dutch were at ease, open, and mature – the
Irish blushed, looked at the ceiling, joked or changed the subject’ (2001: 77).
The girls in this novel use jokes as a defence against their own sense of igno-
rance. Their wit shows them not to be stupid characters but equally high-
lights the almost expected or preferred option to ignore such information and
leave the body in the realms of comedy and ‘non-serious’, rather than face
the fact that they could have difficult decisions to make about the control of
their bodies.
This method of communicating through jokes also covers up the essential
lack of depth in the girls’ relationships with each other. When Sharon tells
the girls that she is pregnant, she is aware that she does not know really how
they will react: ‘She’d often read in magazines and she’d seen it on television
where it said that women friends were closer than men, but Sharon didn’t
think they were. Not the girls she knew’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 183). Sharon
is glad that Jackie, her oldest friend, is there because they defend each other
‘when the slagging got a bit serious’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 181). Even so, it is
only as she ‘grows up’ through the novel that she is able to form a deeper
friendship with Jackie. Sharon’s pregnancy tests the relationship and provides
her with a more mature friendship as she and Jackie bond in order to defend
Sharon. This journey of friendship based purely on surface joking which
moves into a deeper understanding is not confined to the female characters.
It is also reflected in the friendships of the male characters, like Jimmy Sr,
who find it equally difficult to talk to friends about anything serious: ‘Bertie,

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 Pregnancy, comedy and the female body in …

Jimmy  Sr and Bimbo laughed. Paddy was serious, but that made it funnier’
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 201). Bimbo and Jimmy Sr form a more mature friendship
as Bimbo is the other male character who understands Jimmy Sr’s later reas-
sessment of his own moral structures.
The use of comedy as a source of power, but also the ultimate limit of this
power, is also shown in the way Sharon’s reaction to the circumstances of her
baby’s conception is depicted. At the beginning of the novel, all we know is
that Sharon is unwilling to reveal the father of the child. In fact, her pregnancy
marks the downside of carnival and consumption, as she has been assaulted
by one of her friend’s fathers, Mr Burgess, following a night out drinking:
‘It was like waking up. She didn’t know if it had happened’ (Doyle [1990]
1998: 185). It is clear that Sharon is disgusted by the incident and confused
as to what her attitude should be, ‘She’d wondered a few times if what had
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happened could be called rape. She didn’t know’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 185).
Sharon, as a ‘modern woman’ knows enough to question whether this is
right, but there are never any real attempts in the novel to address the ques-
tion of whether this really was rape. As Peach says of her decision to keep the
baby given the circumstances:

Given the way that in Ireland nationalist and religious discourses

together with economic factors have worked against women’s right,
denying women access to birth control and, as enshrined in constitu-
tional amendment in 1982, abortion, the novel treats Sharon’s situation
and decision to have the child somewhat lightly.
(Peach 2004: 153)

Rather than treat the character in question as an aggressor, Sharon reacts

by using comedy to belittle him. After she hears that Mr Burgess may have
been talking about her in the local club, she goes to confront him, not about
his actions on the night but about the fact that she does not want anyone
to hear about it, ‘I don’t mind bein’ pregnant but I do mind people knowin’
who made me pregnant’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 225). Mr Burgess is depicted as a
hypocritical, pathetically misogynistic dinosaur. As Sharon swears at him, he
says, ‘He didn’t think it was right. It sounded dirty’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 223).
Mr Burgess’ attempts to gain control of the situation by giving Sharon money
are insulting, if not slightly disturbing: ‘We made a mistake, Sharon. We were
both stupid. Now go an’ buy yourself a few sweets-eh, drinks’ (Doyle [1990]
1998: 227). This is continued later in the novel when Mr Burgess leaves his
family home and begins to pursue Sharon, convinced that he is in love with
her. His actions mark him out as pathetic, rather than aggressive, and laugh-
able in his inability to control his own communication with Sharon, even
having to borrow writing paper: ‘The writing paper was pink. There was a
bunny rabbit in the top left hand corner, sitting in some light blue and yellow
flowers’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 246). As a character, Sharon uses comedy as a
way to deal with an incident, but the only real action taken in the novel is
to force Mr Burgess to cover this up – ‘Don’t ever talk abou’ wha’ we did to
annyone [sic] again; okay?’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 262) – and this turns out to be
somewhat futile.
This use of humour seems inadequate in balancing out Mr Burgess’ actions.
Bakhtin’s concept of carnival humour is that it brings things into the light,
since ‘light characterizes the folk grotesque. It is a festival of spring, of sunrise,
of morning’ (Bakhtin[1965] 1984: 41), whereas here humour is used to cover

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 Lynne Crook

something up. This seems far more like Mercier’s concept of the grotesque as
allied to something frightening which, despite comedy’s defence, stays fright-
ening. Although the humour deployed against Mr Burgess in the novel brings
down the apparently ‘powerful’ (or one capable of abusing temporary power),
as would happen in Bakhtin’s concept of the use of carnival humour, it is
questionable whether in removing Mr Burgess’ power it also downplays the
seriousness of his actions.
The fact that the father of Sharon’s child is a middle aged, balding father
of a friend also causes problems for Sharon in terms of sheer embarrassment.
In attempting to cover up the identity of the father, she invents a fling with
a ‘Spanish sailor’. In many ways, this seems a more suitable fit for her situa-
tion than the actual reality and ‘made more sense anyway, the lie; it was more
believable’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 267). Veronica, as the character allied to main-
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taining the social status quo, is happy to believe this and tries to persuade
Jimmy Sr to do the same, ‘Veronica says I should believe her whether it’s
true or not’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 267). Jimmy Sr, on the other hand, as the
more open character, cannot quite forgive Sharon until she tacitly tells him
the truth:

An’, come here, an’ anyway; it won’t look like Burgess cos he isn’t the
da. –Isn’t tha’ righ’?
Yeah.
Unless your Spanish sailor looked a bit like him, did he?
Just a little bit.
Ah well, said Jimmy Sr after a small while.
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 293)

The real problem here is the sense of the comic in Barrytown. The society
around her would rather believe that Mr Burgess is the father, because it is
funnier: ‘she knew this as well: everyone would prefer to believe that she’d
got off with Mr Burgess. It was a bigger piece of scandal and better gas’
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 267). Comedy reveals the truth here, but not in order to
defeat the powerful and redress the balance for the powerless, but to mock
the lone figure of Sharon. It is not the only time in the novel that Sharon is
at the receiving end of the conservative side of comedy as a social control;
she leaves her job after a ‘joke’ (‘an’ Garry Dempsey – prick! – he put his
arm around me. In front of everyone, an’ he said to give him a shout if I was
havin’ anny more babies’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 317–18)). The difficult posi-
tion of people like the character of Sharon in the society of the Republic, in
low-paid work and with no job security or redress for such bullying, is clear.
Comedy is defence, attack and a form of communication all at the same
time, and throughout the novel it is difficult to pull these modes apart.
Sharon appears as a modern woman fighting her way out of a conservative
past. She wants her own independence and to take further control over her
body through her new knowledge of pregnancy, such as eating healthily and
doing exercise, though this does seem like swapping one set of received ideas
for another: ‘she didn’t think the exercises mattered that much. She really
did them because she wanted to do everything right, and the book said she
should do them’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 175). Sharon also displays some clearly
distinctly conservative traits and she is very clear about what she thinks of
abortion:

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 Pregnancy, comedy and the female body in …

There’s no way I’d have an abortion, said Sharon.

Good. You’re right.
Abortion’s murder.
It is o’course.
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 150)

Despite the circumstances of her pregnancy, there is no question of ‘choice’

in this sense for Sharon. While she also does not wish to be forced into a
marriage, she also wants (and expects) to stay with her family and be supported
by them, ‘She wanted to stay here so the baby would have a proper family
and the garden and the twins and her mammy to look after it so she could go
out sometimes’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 287). The only time she considers leaving
the family home is just a momentary threat to Jimmy Sr after he goes through
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a brief period of anger with her.

These traditional traits in Sharon are reflected even more strongly in her
mother, Veronica. Veronica bemoans the fact that Sharon will be an unmar-
ried mother and that she and Jimmy Sr have been left behind in their inability
to know how to deal with this:

–Times’ve changed, Veronica, he said.

–I suppose so, said Veronica. –But do we have to keep up with them?
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 189)

This is depicted not so much as a feeling by Veronica that they now have
understand this situation as much as a wish for some kind of utopian past in
which girls did not get pregnant out of wedlock. Veronica and Jimmy Sr find
themselves at a point in time where they have lost the past certainties, but
are without stated moral structures to replace them, leaving them having to
construct new attitudes. As Holquist says about such times of change, ‘it is in
the nature of revolutions that no one can be an experienced citizen of the new
order they bring into being. Those who fought for change, as well as those
who resisted it, are confronted with the postlapsarian mandate to live their
lives without a useable past’ ([1965] 1985: xiv). While Veronica and Jimmy Sr
are not the active agents of this social change, or ‘revolution’, they are still left
in its wake, picking up the pieces of past certainties and trying to construct
them into a suitable form for their current situation.
Veronica is largely confined to the domestic sphere, quite literally in many
ways, as she barely ever seems to go out of the house and we see her most
often in the kitchen or sitting making dresses for her younger daughters’ many
hobbies. She is clearly the respectable figure and responsible parent in coun-
terpoint to Jimmy Sr in his role as the dispenser of largesse and the carnival.
However, this does make the times when Veronica breaks out of this role
into moments of true comedy. As Doyle says of his character, ‘she is a bit of a
martyr where the children are concerned and some of the humour comes out
of that’ (in Monteith et al. 2004: 63). While Jimmy Sr is the permanent antic
comedian, Veronica represents the cracks in the old regime breaking down
under the force of the modern world.
While Veronica is uncertain of Sharon’s actions privately, she is willing
to defend her daughter in public. When Mrs Burgess attempts to visit the
Rabbitte home, quite clearly laying the blame at Sharon’s feet, Veronica acts
entirely out of character in order to defend her daughter: ‘Veronica punched

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her in the face’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 252). Regardless of her own misgivings,
Veronica proves her family to be sacrosanct in an amusingly perverse manner.
However, although Veronica breaks out of her respectable demeanour tempo-
rarily, she only does so in order to re-establish what she views as the best
status quo for her family before going immediately (and comically) back into
her domestic role: ‘Inside, Veronica sat in the kitchen, putting sequins onto
Linda’s dancing dress’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 253). This use of comedy does not
change society, or cause the revolution that Bakhtin hopes, it simply keeps
society and its destabilizing influences away from the domestic sphere. It is
not until later in the series of novels that we see Veronica leave the family
home, and even at this point it is through the very respectable (and female,
opposed to Jimmy’s male, working-class physical labour) route of education,
as she begins to attend night classes.
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Sharon’s pregnancy brings the outside world into the home world of the
Rabbittes’ despite Veronica’s best efforts. It is clear at the start of the novel
that Veronica views sex as a necessary part of marriage, but evidences no real
interest in it, as to some extent does Jimmy Sr:

I suppose a ride’s ou’ of the question.

Hang on until I get this line done, said Veronica.
[…]
I’ll brush me teeth, he said.
That’ll be nice, said Veronica.
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 211)

The comedy in the exchange comes not from a carnivalesque wanton aban-
don, nor from the double entendre one finds in the rest of the novel, but
from the juxtaposition of the loaded subject of sex with the divorced and
matter-of-fact language. Veronica and Jimmy Sr may as well be discussing the
weather or the price of biscuits.
In some ways, Sharon’s pregnancy and the literal birth in the house also
lead to a rebirth of Jimmy Sr and Veronica’s physical relationship. Reading
through Sharon’s baby books, Jimmy learns more about the female body than
years of marriage have taught him. This has effects for Veronica, who does not
seem to know whether to accept this or treat it with mistrust:

There. D’yeh like tha’, Veronica?

It’s alright.
She grabbed his hair.
Where did you learn it?
Ah, let go!
Where?!
In a buke! Let go o’ me!
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 303–04)

Part of the humour comes from the fact that this is so far from Jimmy Sr’s
unreconstructed character that Veronica has to distrust it, and also that it
seems more likely that he must have learnt it by some misdemeanour than
actually to have read a book.
Though Jimmy Sr learns more about the female body, the fact that his
own wife knows more about the process of pregnancy than him actually
comes as something of a shock. More importantly, the earthy way in which

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 Pregnancy, comedy and the female body in …

she chooses to talk about this clearly in order to revenge herself on Jimmy
Sr who has been constantly spouting medical facts from Sharon’s books,
disgusts him:

We don’t want you bursting your waters all over the furniture, isn’t that
right, Jimmy dear? They’re new covers.
She went out, into the kitchen.
Jimmy sat there, appalled. That was the dirtiest, foulest thing he’d heard
in his life. And his wife had said it!
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 326)

While Jimmy is comfortable with the medical terminology, he is also in the

first flushes of seeing birth as the sanitized ‘miracle’ that the novel is at pains
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to prove it is not. Jimmy Sr’s discomfort with the physical reality, and his shock
at having this underlined by his wife, is amusing even as it questions the soci-
ety that could produce a married man with six children who is still, at this
point, so unaware of the circumstances of birth.
While the female characters in the novel show themselves to have a
deeply ambivalent attitude to their own bodies, there is clearly a connection
there which the male characters of the novel lack. Certainly at the beginning
of the novel, most of the male characters seem to either simply distance them-
selves from the female characters or objectify them. While much of the novel
is concerned with Sharon and Veronica’s changing, or revealing, attitudes to
their bodies, the male characters, most especially Jimmy Sr, are also forced to
negotiate their own reactions to the emerging female body in the text.
Jimmy Sr is very clearly at the beginning of the novel the ‘head’ of the
family. However, unlike Veronica who provides stability, Jimmy keeps his
position through his delivery of fun and treats: ‘He often did things like that,
gave away pounds or fivers or said nice things; little things like himself’ (Doyle
[1990] 1998: 154). He is the leader of the carnival, going out into the world to
drink and meet friends in his local pub, as well as bringing back or allowing
the outside world into the house (e.g. allowing his youngest girls to keep a
puppy found on the street).
Although an inclusive character, Jimmy Sr clearly begins the novel as part
of the male sphere outside of his other domestic setting. He frequents the
parts of the local pub that are usually populated by sports teams and his male
friends. At the beginning of the novel, he involves himself in male banter
about women (usually film stars and other unattainable figures) along with
other incidental characters and joins with mocking one of his friends, Bimbo,
who is more open about being a thoughtful family man: ‘He brings home
little umbrellas for his kids. He goes to meetin’s. He brought his mot [wife]
to the pictures last week’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 203). However, the objectifica-
tion of some of the women involved in this banter is shown to be fragile and
hypocritical as it is quickly brought into conflict with a female figure he cannot
objectify – his own daughter:

Sure, fellas –men –are always sayin’ things like tha’ abou’ girls.
Ah yeah, but. Not daughters though.
Don’t be thick, Daddy. All girls are daughters.
Well, not my fuckin’ daughter then.
That’s hypocritical.
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 220)

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 Lynne Crook

When the outside impinges on the family through Sharon, Jimmy finds
himself having to renegotiate his position. It is situation which he has no
control over, potentially altering his social position. When he tries to reassert
himself in the male domain, by fighting some of Burgess’ friends to ‘defend’
Sharon’s reputation, Sharon refuses to thank him but threatens to leave, thus
shaking him from his position as leader of the family: ‘She put you back in
your box, didn’t she? said Veronica’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 278). Having had
his position questioned both outside and inside his domestic sphere Jimmy
Sr sulks, and loses his carnival nature, even refusing to indulge himself by
treating the younger children or going to the pub. Nevertheless, such a threat
from Jimmy Sr is not serious and he soon cracks under the pressure: ‘Jimmy
Sr began to time his moods. This gave him the best of both worlds. He could
enjoy his depression when Sharon was around or when he thought she was
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around and he could enjoy his few pints with the lads as well’ (Doyle [1990]
1998:  283). This tactic is thrown over when Sharon seriously threatens to
leave the family home, apparently to prevent causing Jimmy embarrassment
but really to shake him out of his mood: ‘I’ve made you feel bad an’ that’s
why you’re leavin’. Just cos I was feelin’ hard done by. It’s my fault. Don’t
go Sharon’ (Doyle [1990] 1998:  291). Despite his apparently more outgoing
nature, Jimmy Sr, like Veronica, wants to preserve the home. He may incor-
porate change more easily but he also reflects Eco’s idea that this change is
never an absolute revolution.
After Jimmy has returned to his normal carnivalesque character, he also
returns to his interest in bodily matters. In this case, it is Sharon’s body that
he is interested in, after finding one of her baby books in the house. Jimmy
Sr is at first deeply suspicious of the object, certainly considering analogous to
good Irish morality:

Is this an Irish buke, Sharon?

No. English.
Ah, said Jimmy Sr.
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 159)

However, he later becomes fascinated, as it opens his eyes to an entirely

new world: ‘He’d done a lot of thinking since then. And a lot of read-
ing, and looking at pictures. Those little foetuses all curled up – with their
fingers, and the lot’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 320). As ever, Jimmy Sr under-
stands much of this, but also comically mis-applies it. Sharon finally has
enough of Jimmy’s constant commentary on her pregnancy and as goes to
leave the room he says, ‘You’re gettin’ snotty now cos ‘o your hormones’
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 327). The apparent surface knowledge of the sentence
is comically juxtaposed with the complete ignorance that his actions have
caused Sharon to be ‘snotty’, not her hormones. Her reply, ‘Thanks very
much, Doctor Rabbitte’ (Doyle [1990] 1998:  327), highlights Jimmy’s actu-
ally tenuous knowledge and also his patronizing assumption that he knows
more about Sharon’s physical changes than she does. Nevertheless, the fact
that Sharon knows so little about her own body only goes on to prove that
this form of humour is acting as something of a defence against Jimmy’s
reminder of the fact.
After his reaction against being allowed to work through these occurrences
by being the alpha-male, Jimmy Sr is left with the option of not changing at

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 Pregnancy, comedy and the female body in …

all, and essentially losing to the situation, or controlling it by changing himself

and becoming a more sensitive man. As accords with his essentially carniva-
lesque nature, which open to change, Jimmy chooses the latter: ‘There was
more to life than drinking pints with your mates. There was Veronica, his
wife, and his children’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 320). Eventually, Jimmy moves
through segregating himself from women, including his own wife, to seeing
the integral part that the female body plays in the whole cycle of birth and life
and the links between all of his family: ‘–It got me thinkin’ […] Youse were
all like that once, said Jimmy Sr. –Yeh know. Even Jimmy [Jr]. – I was as well
long, long ago’ (Doyle [1990] 1998: 307). Though Jimmy Sr moves between
change and the preservation of the status quo, it is clear that he comes down
finally on the side of change.
This seems largely to be the theme of the novel itself. Throughout The
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Snapper, there is a dialectic between the impulses of comedy, the carnival and
the grotesque as change, and comedy as a way of defence, preservation or
social control. The revolution, and the related carnival, of Sharon’s pregnancy
brings the female body into focus as a human being with hopes and fears.
These fears are not the temporary fears of the Bakhtinian carnival, which
are easily overcome. Sharon’s fears about her pregnancy are partially born
of an ignorance of her own body, which means that any information on the
possible complications of pregnancy become terrifying in their unfamiliarity.
The comedy here is a defence as much as it is a rejuvenation, especially in
public where it serves to disguise Sharon’s clear discomfort with her own
ignorance.
This extends into the social view of the female body. Once Sharon loses
control of her body (thorough drunkenness) it is she who bears the blame for
her situation, and all she and her family can do is use humour to defend her.
What they cannot do is use that humour to change the situation and social
milieu around them. The Rabbitte’s may use humour to preserve their family
unit, but they are also at the mercy of the humour of Barrytown, which uses
that humour to keep Sharon conscious that she has, ultimately, stepped out of
line, even though this is not an infrequent occurrence.
Although this may make this seem like a hopeless situation, it is clear
that humour also makes the situation, quite clearly, less ‘serious’. Jokes are
temporary and easily tired of, and it is possible for Sharon and her family to
move through this to some stability and preserve their close family unit in a
positive way, by incorporating the change that the baby brings, rather than
allowing Sharon to move away. The latter may have been a bigger ‘revolu-
tion’, but it is not viewed as a more positive one. The triumph of humour
and laughter by the end of the novel is slender, but it is clearly the message
we are left by the final line of the novel, following the birth of Sharon’s
baby:

Ah, said the woman. –Were yeh cryin’?

No, said Sharon. –I was laughin’.
(Doyle [1990] 1998: 340)

References
Bakhtin, M. ([1965] 1984), Rabelais and his World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky),
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Critchley, S. (2002), On Humour, London: Routledge.

Dixon, S. and Falvey, D. (1999), Gift of the Gag: The Explosion in Irish Comedy,
Belfast: Blackstaff Press.
Doyle, R. ([1988] 1998), The Commitments (The Barrytown Trilogy), London:
Vintage London, pp. 1–140.
—— ([1990] 1998), The Snapper (The Barrytown Trilogy), London: Vintage
London, pp. 141–340.
—— ([1991] 1998), The Van (The Barrytown Trilogy), London: Vintage London,
pp. 341–633.
Eco, U. (1984), ‘The frames of comic freedom’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Carnival!,
Berlin: Mouton, pp.1–9.
Holquist, M. ([1965] 1984), ‘Prologue’, in M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua
Rable i narodnaya kul’tura srednevekov’ya i Renessansa/Rabelais and His
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World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky), Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

pp. xiv–xviii.
Krause, D. (1982), The Profane Book of Irish Comedy, New York: Cornell
University Press.
Longley, E (1994), The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland,
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe.
Martin, R. B. (1974), ‘Notes towards a comic fiction’, in J. Halperin (ed.),
The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, New York: Oxford University Press,
pp. 71–90.
Mercier, V. (1962), The Irish Comic Tradition, London: Oxford University
Press.
Monteith, S., Newman, J. and Wheeler, P. (2004), Contemporary Irish and
British Fiction, London: Arnold.
Ni Dhomhnaill, N. (1996), ‘What foremothers?’, in T. O’Connor (ed.), The
Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, Gainsville: University of Florida
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O’Connell, M. (2001), Changed Utterly: Ireland and the New Irish Psyche, Dublin:
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Scott, A. (2005), Comedy, London: Routledge.

Suggested citation
Crook, L. (2012), ‘Pregnancy, comedy and the female body in Roddy Doyle’s
The Snapper’, Comedy Studies 3: 2, pp. 161–175, doi: 10.1386/cost.3.2.161_1

Contributor details
Lynne Crook was awarded her Ph.D. entitled ‘Bordering on laughter: The
uses and abuses of comedy in novels from Northern Ireland and the Republic
of Ireland (1988–present)’ in 2007 from Lancaster University. The thesis
investigated the changing use of comedy in both the North and the Republic
of Ireland reflecting their different socio-economic and political changes
over the period. She now works at the University of Liverpool Management
School.

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 Pregnancy, comedy and the female body in …

Contact: University of Liverpool Management School, University of Liverpool,

Chatham Street, Liverpool, L69 7ZH, UK.
E-mail: l.crook@liverpool.ac.uk

Lynne Crook has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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Figure 1: Katy Brand. Copyright Andy Hollingworth.