Abie's Irish Rose ____ Due Date:

Subject (Literary Work): Abie's Irish Rose Entry #:

Immediate Response

A one-word (or phrase) response to this piece:

Why?

CLICHES.

Seriously, that is the only appropriate short response to Abie's Irish Rose. As Pauline Kael said in her review of Song of Norway, the script brings back cliches you never even knew you knew.

Dion Boucicault managed to squeeze every last ounce of shamrock juice out of various "Stage Oirish" Paddy stereotypes in the 19th century. Nonetheless Anne Nichols manages to take it one step further by combining the Irish stereotypes with Jewish stereotypes. This script is clearly the evolutionary progenitor of a host of second-rate TV sitcoms.

A personal linkage the piece engendered:

I cannot understand how this tripe became the longest-running play in Broadway history. Then again, I don't know...

Gentle stereotypes are presumably both flattering and a sort of frisson to a melting pot audience, I suppose.
Any questions or random thoughts provoked:

What is the overall literary connection between the Irishman and the Jew? Surely a piece of ephemeral pop-culture schlock like Abie's Irish Rose cannot be influenced by Joyce's Ulysses, but in that case what prompts the insistent connection between Irish and Jewish ethnic populations? This would not seem so weird or random to me if it were not that, while considering the text of Abie's Irish Rose, I noticed that not only is it widely touted as the longest-running play in Broaway history -- but that it also opened on Broadway in May of 1922. This is the same year when Joyce's Ulysses was published, but it strikes me that a question of outright…