Irish Studies Review

ISSN: 0967-0882 (Print) 1469-9303 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisr20

Memes, masculinity and mancession: Love/Hate’s

online metatexts

Debbie Ging

To cite this article: Debbie Ging (2017) Memes, masculinity and mancession: Love/Hate’s online
metatexts, Irish Studies Review, 25:2, 170-192, DOI: 10.1080/09670882.2017.1286078

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2017.1286078

Published online: 13 Feb 2017.

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Irish Studies Review, 2017
VOL. 25, NO. 2, 170–192
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2017.1286078

Memes, masculinity and mancession: Love/Hate’s online

metatexts
Debbie Ging
School of Communications, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Ireland

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Since it first aired in 2010 on Radió Teilifís Éireann, Ireland’s national Memes; masculinity; Love/
public service broadcaster, Irish crime drama series Love/Hate has Hate; mancession; post-Celtic
enjoyed record audience ratings. However, while serious TV critics Tiger; tertiary text; Journal.ie;
and the show’s producers have praised it as a complex and incisive metatext
commentary on crime in Ireland, the more participatory online
cultures of the Journal.ie, Twitter and Facebook have constructed
a distinctly less highbrow set of discourses around the show. This
analysis of the Journal.ie’s Daily Edge recaps demonstrates how
participatory Laddish humour and what Jean Burgess refers to as
the “vernacular creativity” of memes have functioned to prioritise a
cohesive set of engagements with Love/Hate that are underpinned by
fantasies about the recuperation of male power. Moreover, by creating
a sense of “in-groupness” around the series, the Daily Edge and its
tertiary texts have produced a heavily gendered sense of consensus
about who “we” in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland are.

Introduction
With national viewer ratings frequently exceeding 1 million, Love/Hate is Ireland’s most com-
mercially successful television drama ever. Five seasons have been broadcast in Ireland, with
a sixth due to reach Irish screens in 2016/2017. It has aired in the US and the UK and it has
been bought by Netflix and by TV markets in Brazil, Israel, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand
and South Korea. Based on rivalries between fictional characters in Dublin’s criminal under-
world, Love/Hate’s original gang leader John Boy (Aidan Gillen) is killed and replaced by
Nidge (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) at the end of season 2. Throughout the subsequent three
seasons, the other key characters, Darren, Tommy, Fran and Elmo, all meet variously grue-
some fates, culminating in Nidge being shot at the end of season 5. Serious critics such as
The Guardian’s Mark Lawson have praised the show, comparing it to The Wire and The
Sopranos. According to Lawson, “what makes Love/Hate distinctive is the way in which the
scripts … [root] the mobster genre in the trends and tensions of contemporary Irish culture”,1
while Ed Power, writing for the Independent.ie, commended the series for its moral and
psychological complexity: “This may be Love/Hate’s crowning achievement: to climb inside
the heads of men (and the occasional woman) who do terrible things, having persuaded
themselves they can live with the consequences”.2 Similarly ambitious claims have been

CONTACT  Debbie Ging  Debbie.ging@dcu.ie

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   171

evident in interviews with the show’s producers and actors, who have lauded the series as
serious social critique and characterised Nidge as a modern-day philosopher. In an interview
with Miriam O’Callaghan on RTÉ Radio 1 in 2013, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor remarked that Nidge
is “a complex man” and that “He’s undeniably charismatic”. He went on to explain,
He’s seductive because he’s always changing, and that’s why he’s a brilliant character to play,
because the minute you think he’s one thing he changes and does something else.3

In an interview in the Herald.ie, Vaughan-Lawlor proclaimed, “He has so many facets, there’s a
domestic and loving side to him, but he’s also lethal. I really enjoy playing him because he’s so
complex”.4
Despite these allusions to moral complexity, there has been little academic analysis of
Love/Hate, and the small handful of scholars who have written about it have been highly
critical of its capacity for social critique. For Paul McGuirk, the series lacks a social, political
or philosophical context, enabling the audience to voyeuristically consider gangland as “a
hermetically sealed parallel universe” that has no relationship to mainstream Irish society.5
Deirdre Quinn6 argues that the show fails to push the genre or to challenge gender norms
in any significant way, while Angela Nagle7 has addressed its seemingly uncritical treatment
of a hyper-violent, misogynistic masculinity, whose amoralism fits well with neoliberal values
of individualism and narcissism, and in which the female characters are complicit. Contrary
to the claims made by entertainment journalists and the series’ producers, therefore, aca-
demic interventions posit that it lacks critical and philosophical complexity.
Here, I wish to extend the emergent academic critique of Love/Hate beyond the text itself
to consider the meanings and pleasures that are constructed through its online, fan-origi-
nated paratexts, in relation to the economic climate out of which it emerged. John Fiske8
distinguishes between the primary television text, officially sanctioned secondary texts (press
releases, interviews, reviews, official websites, etc.) and fan-originated (tertiary) paratexts,
which are created by the audience. It is important to note that, while an online newspaper
like the Journal.ie could be considered as a site of secondary texts relating to the series, it
functions primarily as a tertiary text in relation to Love/Hate on account of its symbiotic
relationship with Twitter and Facebook fandoms and its facilitation of below-the-line com-
mentary. The Journal.ie, Ireland’s largest online news publication, has given extensive and
consistent coverage to Love/Hate, particularly in its Daily Edge section. Of its 430,000 daily
readers, 54% are male and 46% female; 17% are under 25, 53% are between 25 and 44 and
only 25% are over 44. Its readership is therefore closely aligned with the target demographic
of Love/Hate.
The journalists who write the Daily Edge Love/Hate recaps in the Journal.ie, whose tagline
is “Read, Share and Shape the News”, not only position themselves as fans of the series but
constantly recycle and replicate material from other social media sources, effectively situating
the Daily Edge as the hub of Love/Hate’s online metatextual discourses. It is well positioned,
therefore, not only as a barometer of the show’s reception but also as the key conduit for
shaping and reinforcing certain readings and pleasures. Using Diane Negra’s9 and Negra and
Tasker’s10 important work on how the economic downturn in Ireland (and elsewhere) has
been articulated in overtly gendered terms across a range of cultural texts, I contend that
Love/Hate must be viewed in this broader context of new, disaffected performances of mas-
culinity that function as what Negra terms “fantasies of compensatory agency”.11 This analysis
also develops out of my previous work on the appeal of marginalised, criminal and
172   D. GING

disaffected masculinities in a cycle of recent Irish films, arguably precursors to Love/Hate,

whose exaggerated hard masculinities appeal to the fantasy of manhood liberated from the
drudgery of work, the instability of the labour market and the exigencies of feminism, mul-
ticulturalism and other forms of “political correctness”.12

Gendering the recession and the appeal of the gangster

End-of-men and masculnity-in-crisis narratives become most acute in times of economic
recession and are frequently cast in gendered and racial terms of white male disenfranchise-
ment (“black woman stole my job”13) rather than being attributed to neoliberal economic
restructuring.14 The term “mancession” was coined by Mark Perry, an economist from the
University of Michigan, and began appearing in US newspapers during the financial crisis
of 2008–2009. Diane Negra notes in the Irish context that “Across a wide rhetorical spectrum
the notion of men as particularly and singularly impacted by the global recession has become
culturally commonsensical and affectively potent”,15 and she argues that this has resulted
in the emergence of a recurrent cultural trope in which men’s loss of agency is compensated
for by remasculnising narratives or what she refers to as fantasies of “compensatory agency”16:
Film, television, print, and digital culture increasingly compensate for broad vulnerabilities of
economic citizenship with gendered rhetorics of power, success, and family and community
membership.17
The examples Negra cites include documentaries about emigration and “mancession” style
newspaper features as well as advertisements for Snickers, Halifax, the McDonalds Eurosaver
menu and Kerrygold. In all of these texts, she identifies a common thread, where men, fre-
quently coded as tough and working-class, are seen “manning up” to their changed circum-
stances, regaining agency and recuperting power. Negra also identifies The Rubberbandits
“Horse Outside” video as exemplary of this type of recessionary narrative, in which “men’s
falling status and positionality in the recession is recuperated by their symbolic mastery of
women”.18
Given their hypermasculine credentials and ability to thrive independently of the stagnant
economy, it is not suprising then that Love/Hate’s contemporary gangsters have become
such iconic cultural figures in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. It is worth noting, however, that the
popularity of the new gangster cycle in contemporary Irish19 and British cinema predates
the recession. As Negra and Tasker comment,
In an era in which accounts of economic decline frequently privilege male subjectivity (through
such buzzwords as “mancession” and invitations to “man up”), it is instructive to consider the
renewal of long-established tropes of masculinity in “crisis” (of which feminist scholars have
rightly been skeptcal).20
The new gangster genre was revived at the height of the Celtic Tiger in tandem with the rise
of British Lad Culture, in reponse to a separate – though related – set of masculinity-in-crisis
narratives. According to Chibnall,21 Monk22 and Leigh,23 the popularity of this cycle of films
was directly related to the perceived threats of gender equality, metrosexual masculinity
and multiculturalism as well as to the alleged “feminization” of the labour market, the declin-
ing real value of wages and the demise of the male breadwinner role.24 As Chibnall
comments:
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   173

It does not take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the gangster cycle might index wider gender
anxieties and to relate these anxieties to both changing occupational structures and social
expectations and to the demonstrable gains of feminism.25
In my own audience research work I have demonstrated how the Irish variants of these hard,
ostensibly counter-hegemonic masculinities held a similar appeal to Irish male audiences.26
Rather than being understood as commentaries on Irish crime, they were enjoyed and talked
about in relation to other, similar exemplars of the genre from elsewhere, such as Snatch
(2000) and Chopper (2000). Most importantly, they were enjoyed as fantasies of male empow-
erment, stability and rebellion in the face of an increasingly insecure and feminised workforce
and politically-correct society which, they felt, was unfairly pro-women and offered men
fewer and fewer homosocial spaces.27
If the post-Fordist casualisation of the workforce during the boom years rendered work
an unstable signifier of masculinity, this has become hyper-intensified in the recession. At
the level of cultural representation, we have seen work as a marker of manhood effectively
disappear from the popular cultural imginary. Once the staple of beer advertising,28 the
blue-collar worker has been replaced by the “slacker” of Bud Light adverts29 and the jok-
ey-blokey adolescent Lads of WKD and Carlsberg advertising.30 In the absence of employ-
ment, new identities and activities are invoked to reaffirm male power and privilege, such
as organised crime, joyriding, stealing horses, betting, prostitution, pornography and
drug-dealing. In this context, the gangster functions as the quintessential “fantasy of com-
pensatory agency” for a number of reasons: his money-making is not constrained by the
regular economy, he is repositioned at the centre of power while women are relegated to
roles of wives or sexual objects, he revels in exclusively homosocial spaces and, because he
operates outside the law, he accommodates fantasies of rebellion and counter-hegemony.
As gang leader John Boy comments in Series 2, “Ireland is fucked for the next 10 years, you
know that, don’t you? This is the only game where you’ll make any money”.
Moreover, the gangster exhibits a preoccupation with pain and suffering, frequently rev-
elling in the kind of “frenzied and showy”“protest masculinities” described by R.W. Connell,31
yet staking no genuine claim to social exclusion or suffering. According to David Savran,32
this trope of the victimised, suffering white male, which he terms reflexive sado-mascochism,
has become a dominant expression of masculinity in contemporary American culture,33
which attempts to recuperate white male power through the articulation of its loss. In Ireland,
Sinead Molony has noted the structuring absence of men in two recent documentaries,34, 35
which she argues signals a reactionary moment of national uncertainty and mourning about
the loss of patriarchal manhood.36 Chiming with the politics of Robert Bly’s Iron John, the
American mythopoetic men’s movement and, more recently, a plethora of politically con-
servative Men’s Rights Associations, this type of “affirmative reaction”37 extols hypermascu-
linity in response to a catalogue of perceived injustices against men, and is becoming
increasingly “culturally commonsensical and affectively potent”38 across a range of Irish media
texts.

“Dead Cats, Nidge’s arse and Fizzy Orange”: the shaping of Love/Hate’s
online metatexts
Orthodox practices of fandom tend to be characterised by a deep and sophisticated engage-
ment with the text’s narrative and aesthetic qualities as well as with its writers and actors,
174   D. GING

and their characters and relationships. However, several recent studies demonstrate that
online engagements can be less about expressing knowledge about or devotion to the text
itself than they are about identity and image management online. Marwick et al.,39 in their
transmedia analysis of Glee, have observed how “liking” the show on Facebook was a way of
demonstrating one’s status as supportive, inclusive and LGBT-positive, suggesting that many
fans’ affective investments may have more to do with signalling inclusion and self-­
identification than with showcasing specialist textual knowledge. Kate Miltner’s40 study of
LOLCats memes also illustrates how seemingly trivial pieces of media – pictures of cats with
captions – can act as “meaningful conduits for intricate social relations”.41 In this case, the
originators of LOLcats (mostly anonymous adherents of 4chan/b/’s notoriously misogynstic
geek/hacker community) reacted with hostility when their memetic formula was coopted
by (female) outsiders, expressing their outrage in gendered terms. As one respondent
described it, the memes became imbued with “a strong stench of sort of sentimentality”
associated with “aging women in the Midwest”.42 Here, the creation and sharing of memes
was primarily about identity work and in–group boundary establishment and policing. As
Limor Shifman notes, “Internet memes can be treated as (post)modern folklore, in which
shared norms and values are constructed through cultural artifacts such as Photoshopped
images or urban legends”.43 According to Shifman, in an era of “networked individualism”,
the affective value of meme sharing is that it “allows people to be “themselves’ together”,44
in other words to signal both their individuality and their affiliation with a larger community
or in-group. In this sense, the LOLCats enthusaists – and by the same token Love/Hate’s online
fans – cannot be fully understood within the parameters of conventional fandom as their
focus is less on the text itself than how they use it to affirm, prioritise and celebrate a par-
ticular worldview. Rather they must be viewed in the broader context of new, disaffected
performances of masculinity that perceive themselves as radically counter-hegemonic but
are, at the same time, unashamedly misogynistic.45
Love/Hate’s “affective potency”46 began to manifest itself online and, subsequently, in
more traditional media after the beginning of Season 3. The first two seasons, which featured
Aidan Gillen as the gang leader, had generated little if any of the sort of Laddish, irreverent
bravado and humorous meme culture that began to appear on Twitter and Facebook around
this time. This discursive shift can be directly traced to the appearance of the Journal.ie’s
Daily Edge recaps, the first of which appeared after episode 1 of Love/Hate’s season 3 on 12
November 2012. In anticipation of series 3, a King Nidge Facebook page was set up in
September 2012, to celebrate John Boy’s demise and replacement by new gang leader Nidge.
While it is impossible to determine the precise directional flows of the symbiosis between
the Daily Edge and unofficial Twitter and Facebook accounts, it is clear that they began paying
attention to one another at around this time.
Towards the end of Season 3, the Daily Edge ran an article entitled “Love/Hate parody
Twitter accounts: Your essential guide”, made up of screen grabs from accounts with handles
such as @Fran_d_man and @aidoesbudgieR1P. While most of the visual content in the early
(Season 3) recap articles consisted of screengrabs from the episode under review, it became
more varied and inclusive over time, including tweets, screen grabs, gifs and memes taken
from Twitter and Facebook. The recaps also began to draw higher numbers of comments
(the number of views for each article varies between 20,000 and 48,000). Within minutes of
the first episode of S4 being aired, which opened with a teenage boy shooting a passing
cat, a Love/Hate Cat Twitter account was set up, drawing 1454 followers. The Daily Edge recap
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   175

Figure 1. Daily Edge recap, 14 October 2013.

the following day was titled “Dead cat, Tommy’s fizzy orange and Fran’s tooth”. Spin-off articles
included “Yes we’ve rated the Love/Hate lads’ penis size”, “An essential Love/Hate translation
guide for UK viewers” and a Love/Hate drinking game, which was effectively a way of flagging
certain aesthetic and thematic idiosynchrosies in the show, such as Darren’s blue hoodie
and Nidge’s signature facial expression (Nidge Face TM). By this stage, a distinct style of
online Love/Hate criticism and commentary had become established. A preliminary analysis
of all the Daily Edge recaps and their comments revealed a recurring set of themes and
stylistic formats, centering around a deep fascination with violent, misogynistic masculinities,
coupled with a simultaneous desire to domesticate and render them harmless with self-know-
ing Irish humour (Figure 1).
One of the most striking features of this discourse is the way in which it invokes a con-
sensual viewer experience that is heavily underpinned by a sense of shared national identity
and experience. Most importantly, this concept of collective Irish experience is strongly
gendered, unproblematically assuming a male heterosexual mode of address (“€75 will get
you a private massage. Sure where would you be goin’?”) and presenting its masculinist
sensibilities as both Irish and gender-neutral. This is achieved primarily through a self-aware
fetishisation of Irish slang and trivia, which serves not only to create a sense of in-groupness
but also to downplay and render charming the brutality of the underclass Dublin psychopath.
The analysis below explores these tropes in more detail. It considers the ideological per-
spectives that are “baked into”47 the formats of social media’s engagements with Love/Hate
and demonstrates how certain formulae have generated metatextual discourses about the
show, which have in turn influenced the way in which it is understood, enjoyed and talked
about in more mainstream fora in Ireland. These discursive parameters are so far removed
from the lofty terms of reference invoked by serious media criticism and the series’ producers
176   D. GING

that they raise important questions about the power of participatory culture48 and the “ver-
nacular creativity”49 of memes, in particular, to generate widespread affective consensus
about cultural texts.

Nidge loves a bird in a tracksuit: the affective pleasures of Love/Hate’s hardcore

masculinities
Love/Hate embodies all of the features of the cinematic gangster genre, positioning the
viewer inside its homo- and anti-social microcosm, in opposition to the pro-social world. In
its more recent manifestation, however, the new gangster cycle is heavily characterised by
recycling, reappropriation and pastiche, frequently gesturing to classics such as Get Carter
and The Long Good Friday but essentially reveling in the “cartoon style” and “high-concept
aesthetics”50 of the television action series, “replacing ethics with exhibition and personality
with spectacle”.51 Steve Chibnall52 makes an important distinction between classic gangster
texts, which he claims strive for “unvarnished authenticity” and which he dubs
“gangster-heavy”, and postmodern reiterations, which “cheerfully peddle myth” such as
Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and which he terms
“gangster-light”. The latter, Chibnall claims, are identified by a strong emphasis on music and
soundtrack, fast editing and striking cinematography. Gangster-light films also have more
fragmented, less coherent plots, are punctuated with “cool moments”, feature shocking/
witty dialogue, cast familiar faces from TV and are characterised by faux-ness, which he
defines as “a knowing theatrical distortion of real life, a mutually condoned simulacrum that,
by a typically post-modern conceit, is something better than the real thing”.53
Gangster heavy, on the other hand, is intense and predominantly introspective, features
naturalistic dialogue and is underscored by an unobtrusive use of cinematography, music
and editing. It is informed by a tragic (Sheakspearean/Jacobean) narrative structure and
plays the gangster character as a tragic hero.54 Chibnall shares Leigh’s concern about the
gender-political underpinnings of the postmodern gangster cycle, claiming that it evokes
“a world of masculine competitive sociability we might call ‘Ladland’”, which he describes as
a “Hobbesian jungle of ruthless competitors”55 in which male bullying, homophobia and
misogyny are normalised and celebrated rather than explored. Despite its obvious aspirations
to gangster-heavy, it is clear from Facebook, Twitter and Daily Edge commentary that Love/
Hate’s online fans interpret the show through the lens of gangster light. Framing the dis-
course within Lad Culture’s terms of reference serves two main functions. Firstly, Lad Culture’s
signature blokey humour allows violent and misogynistic masculinities to be celebrated but
in a way that offers an escape clause in the guise of irony.56 Secondly, Laddish humour facil-
itates the creation of in-jokes and the fetishisation of trivia, both of which have been used
to reinforce a collective and strongly gendered discourse of national consensus around Love/
Hate and its attendant pleasures.
Analysis of the Daily Edge recaps, comments and other social media interventions reveals
a recurrent simplification of the series “themes to Ladland’s shorthand grotesquerie”57 of
bodily fluids, sex, violence and an adolescent fixation on certain words and phrases, such as
Fran’s signature phrase “Coola boola”. This resonates strongly with the the politically incorrect
loquaciousness and propensity for lengthy, expletive-filled monologues evident in films
such as In Bruges, Intermission and The Guard, whose buzzwords and phrases are readily
absorbed and entusiastically performed by male audiences.58 As Guardian journalist Sarah
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   177

Hughes enthuses, Love/Hate’s dialogue “is a winning mixture of baroque insults (“Are you a
lady bird or a dirt bird?”) and Dublin slang delivered in thick Northside accents (“Get out of
my car, you nosy geebag”) coming together to form something that feels like an updated
Irish version of Trainspotting”.59 The following Daily Edge comment thread is typical, and
reflects viewers’ delight in Fran’s one-liners:
Gary:  Fran seems to be enjoying himself the hero

Mike:  durrrrrttttt birrdddddd, great line, Fran will gain cult status with crackers like that ya
shower of bleedin geebags

Gary:  Fran the man is having great craic

Sinead: I love Fran

Shane:  Fran’s the man

Karen:  f rans 1 liners are the best … ur hair ill grow back but ur face wont … ya get me!!(S3E2
recap comments)
The tenor of Love/Hate’s online discourses, enmeshed as they are in trivia and insider
humour, work to produce a specifically Irish variant of Ladishness, framing the show’s male
characters as simultaneously violent and dangerous, yet also infantilised and endearing.
Thus, the fetishisation of Tommy’s craving for fizzy orange, Nidge’s growing concern about
hair loss or his wonderment at his son’s drawing of giraffes are not merely reflective of Irish
humour’s tendency toward “slagging” but also allow us to contemplate psychopathic killers
from an affectionate, insider perspective, namely that of the stereotypical “Irish Mammy”,
another theme of which the Journal.ie is especially fond. Interestingly, Negra60 notes that
the abiding Irish Mammy is the female corollorary of the Irishman in recessionary crisis. While
there is not scope within the current article to explore the Irish mother in depth, it is sufficient
to note that she is a conservative, over-nurturing and sexless figure who considers men to
be helpless, childlike and in constant need of care, yet fully accepts their patriarchal
domination of her. The Irish Mammy is renowned for ignoring her daughters and worshipping
her sons, irrespective of their transgressions and disrespect for her.
It is precisely this emotional dynamic that underpins much of the online disocurse about
Love/Hate’s male characters, allowing them to be given affectionate nicknames such as
Nidgeweasel, Nidgey, King Nidge and Fran the Man. Indeed, a popularity contest between
Nidge and Fran dominated much online commentary during season 5. After episode 2, in
which Fran discovers that Nidge had his wife killed, the #teamfran Twitter hashtag started
up, which was covered by the Daily Edge that night (“9 people who are firmly #TeamFran
after tonight’s Love/Hate: the sh*t has hit the Fran”). On 20 October 2014, the Daily Edge ran
a poll, “Are you team Fran or team Nidge? It’s time to decide”. This indicated that Fran’s pop-
ularity had grown considerably, although reader comments from the Season 3 recaps suggest
that he was always much admired. The memes below demonstrate how ostensibly banal
props and plot details are repurposed by the Daily Edge to normalise Love/Hate’s gangster
masculinities, with a view to rendering them both lovable and representative of “us all”
(Figures 2 and 3).
That both female and male commenters find these characters compelling is not surprising
in the context of either Lad Culture or Irish Mammy culture, both of which rely on the collu-
sion of women to conceal their patriarchal underpinnings, often mobilising or depending
on the broader rhetoric of postfeminism to imply that equality is a fait accompli. However,
178   D. GING

Figure 2. Tweet reposted on Daily Edge recap, 7 October 2013.

Figure 3. Daily Edge recap, 27 October 2014.

the stark difference in the way in which male and female characters are talked about call
such assumptions into question. The screenshots, memes and comments relating to the
show’s female characters consistently work to sexualise and trivialise them. While it can be
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   179

argued that these images and messages take their cue from the gender dynamics of the
primary text, their recontextualisation in the Daily Edge engages a signature Lad Culture
device by simultaneously amplifying and performing mock disapproval of their objectifica-
tion. Although this humour is filtered through a PC safety clause, as the meme below illus-
trates, the potential for Laddish readings remains unperturbed (Figure 4):
Other potentially offensive Daily Edge captions such as “Nidge loves a bird in a tracksuit”
and “Nobody wants to f**k a fat rabbit” (a reference to one of the female characters in fancy
dress, S3E3) are carefully woven into the recaps to imply reported speech by one of the
show’s characters, thus evading direct responsibility. Below-the-line contributors, however,
were less cautious, and their oftentimes sexist and misogynistic comments about the female
characters went unchallenged:
Johnny:  Jesus I was disgusted when I saw that Debbie tit back again. She is brutal. In ever
sense of the word.(S4E1 recap comments)

Gandalf:  Debbie is best looking brazzer ever :)

Marcus:  She is a terrible looking yoke. An absolute brute.

Jerome:  Ginger Jizzabelle is a skag-hag!

Dym:  She’s an awful actor/actress – unless she’s being told to act like a gob5hite, of
course, in which case she’s great

Shaun:  Terrible in every sense of the word. Terrible is too small a word.(S4E3 recap
comments)
When female commenters complained about women’s roles or the violence in the show,
male fans used a number of silencing strategies, which are typical both of Lad Culture and
of the kind of exclusionary devices that Angela Nagle61 has identified across a raft of online
forums. These include casting them as humourless feminists, accusing them of reactionary
conservatism, using quotes from the show to belittle them and making veiled sexual threats.
The exchange below, in which four male commenters rally together, is exemplary of all of
the above:
Alice:  Cannot understand why anyone would want to watch this programme. No wonder
our society is becoming more and more violent every day if people can find this
sort of garbage entertaining.

John:  Alice, you must be gutted Bosco isn’t on anymore!!!62 Best RTE series in years if not
ever!!

Finn:  It’s help you need not hassle63

Mark:  Nah, I’d say Alice was all about the Sunday night build up to Glenroe

Bob:  In Alice we thrust(S4E3 recap comments)

The memetic creativity of Love/Hate’s laddish metatexts arguably reached it peak in the
wake of the final episode of season 5, in which Noely took revenge on Fran for urinating on
his mother’s grave by raping him in prison with a broken pool cue. This provoked a large
number of rape jokes and memes on Twitter and Facebook (Figures 5–7).
In an article entitled “Why was everyone making rape jokes after the Love/Hate finale?”,64
the Daily Edge re-posted the rape memes and jokes, while simultaneously berating “several
prominent media outlets” for doing the same, including FM104 and RTÉ 2FM, who had posted
180   D. GING

Figure 4. Daily Edge recap, 4 November 2013.

Figure 5. Meme posted on Facebook, 12 November 2014.

Figure 6, which was subsequently deleted after several complaints. A similar strategy is used
in the meme below, whereby the Daily Edge ostensibly critiques police racism while
simultaneously trading on its racist shock value (Figure 8):
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   181

Figure 6. Tweet from 9 November 2014, reposted in Daily Edge article, 10 December 2014.

Figure 7. Tweet posted on 10 November 2014, reposted in Daily Edge article, 10 December 2014.

The article then went on to ask and answer a number of serious questions, citing experts
from the Rape Crisis Centre and Just Detention International (“So are these just a bit of fun?
Would it be different if the victim had been female?”). In this way, the Journal.ie/Daily Edge
182   D. GING

Figure 8. Daily Edge recap, 14 October 2013.

managed to both collude in and critique the Laddish nature of Love/Hate’s meme makers.
When a couple of commenters berated the Journal.ie for what they saw as opportunistic
recycling and pseudo-criticism of distasteful memes, the regular posters resented the serious
direction the discussion had taken, and either expressed anger and frustration at this incur-
sion of political-correctness and “humourless activists” into the Daily Edge space or tried to
steer the thread back on course, using flippant humour. The following comments were
typical:
Gerry:  PC brigade/do Gooders at it again! Relax will ye, it’s a fictional TV show! Probably
the same crowd that was crying about the ‘poor cat’! Clowns

John:  See this is the problem. You laughed because you thought it was funny. Now you’re
reassessing because other people have told you it’s not funny or politically correct.
People losing sight of the fact that this is a TV show.

Mark:  Bring back Glenroe I say …(Daily Edge article comments, 10 November 2014)

Sheamus: Nobody murdered, no animals harmed, no sex scenes. The Board na Moaners65 had
a real bad night – nothing to complain about(S4E2 recap comments)
These offensive and defensive reactions of male fans to any sort of criticism of the show’s
violence or misogyny follow a somewhat paradoxical pattern. On the one hand, their admi-
ration of and affection for Love/Hate’s characters is rooted in a desire to domesticate, nor-
malise and identify with them, yet criticisms provoke a contrary discourse – “Don’t take it
seriously”, “It’s only a fictional TV show” – which would appear to belie the very real pleasures
and meanings that watching and talking about such masculine performances entail. Like
the participants in Lacey’s66 study of male British fans of The Sopranos, their comments
indicate that the attraction of such characters, however fictional or (un)realistic they are
understood to be, is nonetheless related to their own emotional and material circumstances.
At a time in which employment is deeply unstable and male identity is perceived to be under
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   183

Figure 9. Daily Edge recap, 11 November 2013.

threat, it is not surprising that wealth, linguistic bravado and mastery over women might
have significant appeal, both to men who are genuinely economically marginalised as well
as to those whose grievances may have more to do with the perceived threats of equality
and political correctness. Nidge and his gang embody a fantasy of male autonomy and
power without responsibility. They have homes and wives or girlfriends but also unrestricted
access to prostitutes, drugs and guns. They are effectively men-children who inhabit “an
inherently homosocial subculture, in which male rituals, hierarchies and rivalries often seem
to take precedence over gangland’s ostensible business of illegal money-making”.67
Finally, despite fans’ rejection of the claim that the show glamourises violence on the
grounds that most of the characters get shot, beaten up or killed, there is a clear fascination
with the spectacle of male pain and suffering in the Daily Edge recaps and commentary. This
reached its peak at the end of Season 4, when Nidge undergoes a bizarre existential crisis,
in which he masochistically claws at his chest in a prison cell to the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in
the UK. Although this is clearly intended as a “gangster-heavy” moment, the scene is reap-
propriated in the meme above as a straightforward, “gangster-light” hagiography of Nidge
the anti-hero (Figure 9):
It is clear from the proliferation of Laddish imagery and commentary online that the
nihilism of Love/Hate’s characters offers certain escapist pleasures to members of the male
audience, who feel that the culture is increasingly stifled by political correctness. Despite
the show’s aspirations to “gangster heavy”,68 which explores the social and psychological
complexities of crime with “unvarnished authenticity”, the memetic culture that surrounds
it is exemplary of “gangster light”, which Chibnall claims revels in irony and appropriates the
more superficial elements of the genre, evading its moral seriousness and strongly disavow-
ing the homoerotic in favour of the homosocial.

The country needs a big hug after tonight’s Love/Hate: trivia, in-jokes and appeals
to a collective national experience
While the discourse identified above is heavily gendered, not only in its thematic concerns
but also in its presumed male gaze and mode of address, other devices work to produce a
184   D. GING

de-gendered discourse of consensus around Love/Hate’s affective pleasures. These are the
recurrent use of Irish trivia and in-jokes and the interpellatation of the Daily Edge’s readers
in such a way as to imply a collective national experience. The headline of each Daily Edge
recap is based on a simple formula, made up of three ostensibly remarkable events or features
from the episode in question. These are rarely related to important plot developments,
however, tending to focus more on trivia that have shock or “gross-out” value or are used to
create endearing in-jokes about the more banal aspects of characters’ lives, such as Nidge’s
son getting headlice, his own concerns about hair loss or the stress caused to Janet’s knees
when performing oral sex on Nidge. Typical examples were “Fish tanks, Bambi eyes and bad
parenting” and “Hair loss, love hearts and Jägerbombs”. The recap articles themselves are
text-light, following a sort of photo essay format in which narrative developments are doc-
umented through the lens of humorous observations relating to a plethora of trivia, such
as Aido’s budgie, the IKEA lighting in Nidge’s new bar, IRA members drinking Jägerbombs
or the fact that Detective Moynihan chews his pens.
Many of the Daily Edge Love/Hate spin-off articles were also inspired by the show’s most
irrelevant details, such as Aido’s ordering ham and pineapple pizza, the headline for which
read, “8 people who were utterly disturbed by THAT scene in tonight’s Love/Hate. In what
was the single most stomach-churning scene ever broadcast on Irish television, Nidge’s
henchman Aido got … pineapple on his pizza”.69 In another spin-off article entitled “Yes
we’ve rated the Love/Hate lads’ penis size”,70 circumspect information is used to guess which
gang member owns the “mystery trousersnake”, with Tommy getting a five-out-of five penis
score for having “the stones to bring a baby to a brothel”. By the end of Season 5, other sites
had begun to mimic the Daily Edge’s format and penchant for trivia. On 22 November 2014,
In Dublin magazine ran a piece entitled, “10 things we love about Love/Hate”, which featured
stills from the series and included highlights such as Nidge’s Creepy Smile, Fran’s Missing
Teeth, Tommy’s Fizzy Orange and Git’s finger bone. At this point, even articles about Love/
Hate on the RTE website had begun to adopt elements of the Daily Edge style, with article
headlines such as “Watch! What you love about Love/Hate” and “Look! Elmo and the gnomes
on Love/Hate”. The RTE website also began to incorporate comments and memes from
Twitter, with a strong emphasis on trivia and humour. On 6 October 2014, an article entitled
“Love/Hate: Have your say!” was almost indistinguishable from the Daily Edge recap style,
opening with the following observations:
Three things we learned from Sunday night’s episode:

(1)  Never ask someone if their child has head lice.

(2)  The general consensus on Twitter is that Paulie is a bit of alright.
(3)  Always lock your doors. Always.

It also featured memes and comments from Twitter, which were strongly imitative of the
Daily Edge’s trivia-based humour (Figure 10):
Meanwhile, parody news site Waterford Whispers began to engage in a simultaneous
lampooning of and collusion in the Daily Edge’s preoccupation with Love/Hate-related trivia,
running articles with titles such as “Fran’s Teeth To Appear On The Late Late Show”, “Phrase
‘Coola Boola’ To Be Phased Out By 2018” and “Which Love/Hate Character Are You?”
Analysis of the Daily Edge reader comments demonstrates that the articles’ focus on trivia
humour strongly determined both the parameters and the tone of below-the-line comments
and discussion. Jokes about Tommy’s fizzy orange, Git’s finger bone, Trish’s hairstyles, the
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   185

Figure 10. Tweet from 5 October 2014, reposted on the RTE website in an article entitled “Love/Hate:
Have your say!”, 6 October 2014.

décor in the brothel, Fran’s teeth (did he really lose them?) and Nidge’s trainers were common,
as were tongue-in-cheek discussions about the plausibility or realism of irrelevant details:
Shay: Anyone notice the Lexus SUV Nidge was driving had a 09 reg once and an 05 reg
in another shot? Continuity in Love/Hate was always crap. Adds a bit of humour sometimes.
In the last series Darren’s moustache kept changing :-D
Mark:  Yes and my wife didn’t believe me! She was too annoyed at seeing her Avoca cushion
in Nidges flat !(S3E1 recap comments)

Martin: Who keeps e in the fridge? Is that a thing now?? I’m definitely getting old.(S5E5 recap
comments)
One commenter located the source of the brothel’s duvet covers, while the mention of
RTE’s Aertel pages at the end of S3E1 for anyone affected by that evening’s show was the
source of much amusement, provoking tweets such as “If you’ve been affected by a keg in
the head, turn to Aertel page 261” and “If you have been affected by any of the issues such
as being buried alive in the Dublin mountains with a digger turn to Aertel page 327”. Thus,
while much of the initial inspiration for the Daily Edge recaps came from comments and
memes on Twitter, the journalists in question developed this fetishisation of trivia into a style
which, in turn, came to shape not only the tone of Daily Edge readers’ below-the-line com-
ments but also, over time, more mainstream discourses about Love/Hate in Irish society. This
186   D. GING

Figure 11. Tweet posted @dailyedge.ie on 9 November, 2014.

became so pervasive that on 12th January 2015, the Journal.ie reported that the computer
science exam in the national Leaving Certificate state examinations featured a “subtle yet
excellent Love/Hate reference: it’s all about the gnomes”.71
The second discursive strategy at work in the Daily Edge recaps revolves around their
mode of address. By appealing to the audience in such a way as to imply a cosy, communal
viewer experience, they succeed in obscuring the heavily gendered nature of the articles.
References were regularly made to Glenroe, a popular rural soap that ran from 1983 to 2001,
which for many older viewers would have been a Sunday night ritual. As one commenter
put it, “Yeah …we have come a long way with this gripping masterpiece…20 years ago
Glenroe was the highlight of Sunday night viewing” (S5, E4 comments), while another con-
tributor described Love/Hate as “Skanger Glenroe”.72 Regular appeals were also made to “the
Fear”, another supposedly collective Sunday night experience in Ireland, which refers to the
nervous anxiety and concern about memory loss that follow heavy drinking sessions. Typical
sub-headlines were:
The country needs a big hug after tonight’s Love/Hate: come here to me (Daily Edge,
October 26, 2014).
Watching RTE’s gangster drama Love/Hate is going to do nothing for a bad dose of the
fear on a Sunday night, but it has become compulsive viewing (S3E3 recap).
“Read the news faster”, we screamed at the telly as the time for Love/Hate approached
(S3E3 recap).
Well, last night’s episode of Love/Hate took a lot out of us (S4E2 recap).
Well, are we all okay after last night’s episode? Have we all taken a dose of ulcer medication
and had a few Hob Nobs to comfort ourselves? (S5E4 recap).
Well, it’s all over. What are we supposed to do on Sunday nights now? One thing’s for sure,
it was an emotional rollercoaster (S5E6 recap).
The Daily Edge also capitalised on tweets that indicated viewers were experiencing the
same sort of emotional experiences (Figure 11). After Series 5 Episode 4, for example, a
pre-recap article appeared featuring tweets in which commenters expressed how “shook”
viewers were (“People are shook. They’re fierce shook”). This appeal to the pleasures of
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   187

collective viewing was readily taken up by commenters, who frequently expressed their
appreciation of the show in quasi-patriotic terms, proud of what Ireland was capable of
producing:
Dearbhla:  Cant wait till next week. Best show ever on RTE

Man about Town: Agree. Really enjoyed it even if the violence was extreme. Quality telly.

Masala:  What a show. Disturbing contraversial but truely entertaining. We are capable
of great things in this country.(S3E1 recap comments)
Dissenters were generally treated with intolerance. One commenter, who asked if he was
the only person who didn’t think it was the greatest show ever, was told in no uncertain
terms that he was alone. Another commenter, who was unable to get Love/Hate because
she lived abroad said, “I feel so left out”, a sentiment that was echoed by others in the same
situation. It is significant in itself that not all commenters on the threads were watching Love/
Hate but rather using the Daily Edge recaps to keep up with how people in Ireland were
talking about it. As Marwick et al. point out, “Viewers can be deeply invested in a program
without engaging in “fannish” activities, or even standard viewing practices, as shown by
our viewers, who were more devoted to the program’s existence in a cultural context than
its fine details”.73
The relentless focus on the notion of a collective and homogenous “we” was further inten-
sified by Daily Edge spin-off articles such as “An essential Love/Hate translation guide for UK
viewers”. This reveling in the linguistic idiosyncrasies of Hiberno-English – but more specifi-
cally in the peculiarities of Dublin working-class slang – informed many of the below-the-line
discussions and was another way in which a sense of in-group consensus was established.
As one commenter put it, “Loving ‘Love Hate’ is like hating the brits … if you’re not irish, you
wouldn’t understand”. This type of banter is similar to that identified by Miltner74 in her study
of LOLcats, whereby humour functioned as a mechanism through which symbolic bound-
aries were erected and maintained.75 This kind of identification humour or in-joking is used

Figure 12. Daily Edge recap, 3 November 2014.

188   D. GING

to anchor meaning and to distinguish insiders from outsiders.76 Combined with the way in
which everyday signifiers of Irishness are used to humanise and infantilise Love/Hate’s char-
acters, it works to create a very specific understanding, both of the show and of Irishness as
insular and ethnically homogenous, yet self-knowingly feckless and endearing. As the meme
above demonstrates, this style revolves around the aesthetic and ideological sensibilities of
Lad Culture, yet strives to conceal its distinctly male mode of address beneath appeals to a
universal sense of Irishness (“We have all been that soldier.”; Figure 12):

Conclusion
Love/Hate’s online discourses indicate that the series’ popularity has considerably more to
do with the cultural prevalence of “mancession” sensibilities in Ireland than with the realities
of Dublin’s gangland crime scene. In this sense, the show represents another potent example
of the gendering of the social fabric of recessionary experience.77 The Daily Edge has been
instrumental in both feeding and feeding off the pervasive memetic and in-joke culture that
informs social media engagements with with the series. Social media and their attendant
participatory cultures have worked to galvanise viewers’ affective investments in Love/Hate
around certain discursive tropes, which are deeply bound up in a wider cultural moment of
recession-related male disaffection. In spite of the efforts of officially-sanctioned secondary
texts78 to sell it as serious social critique, the dominant public discourse around Love/Hate
is characterised by Laddish banter and the kind of reactionary masculinism that Negra79
argues is key to current conceptions of post-Celtic-Tiger Ireland identity. That the synergistic
recycling of certain memetic and linguistic formats on Facebook, Twitter and the Daily Edge
have, over time, succeeded in inflecting the register of more mainstream commentary on
the series (In Dublin, the RTE website) is testament to the ability of participatory media to
engender affective consensus. In this sense, Love/Hate’s online (tertiary) discourses, far from
creating an alternative space for oppositional readings of the text, have rather been the core
conduit for consolidating a pervasive discourse of national consensus on what Love/Hate
means to Irish people and why it is so popular.
It is important, however, not to over-emphasise the power of social media. As previous
academic critique has pointed out, Love/Hate’s own structural failings are also partly to blame
for the ease with which it can be interpreted through the lens of Lad Culture’s proclivity for
sex, violence and “gangster-light”. Unlike Danish television drama, for example, which must
adhere to certain public service broadcasting “dogma” such as “double-storytelling” to ensure
that stories are not merely entertaining but also have a broader ethical or social message,80
Love/Hate runs along a single narrative track, omitting the axis of social critique or the “phil-
osophical layer”.81 This makes it easier for audiences to focus on stylistic and superficial
qualities rather than engaging with more complex questions of social and structural ine-
quality as, for example, The Wire interpellates us to do. Interestingly, the only time that Daily
Edge commenters evoked comparisons with The Wire and Breaking Bad was when Love/Hate
began to focus on the police in Season 4, which was perceived by online commenters as a
negative development as it shifted the focus away from the gangsters and slowed the series
down.
The current study provides a clear example of fandom as a set of affective relationships
with cultural texts,82 forcefully reiterated through the intertextuality of online media, whereby
more critical or nuanced readings are eclipsed by the pleasures of Ladland and the constant
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   189

emphasis on a consensual, collective “we”. As Miltner points out, the emotional resonance
and sense of connectivity that memetic texts facilitate must also prompt us to ask, “what
voices get silenced because their affective sensibilities fall outside the boundaries set by
dominant forces in our cultural collectives?”83 Like Lad Culture itself, Love/Hate’s metatextual
discourses are exceptionally adept at deflecting criticism. That both male and female jour-
nalists write the recaps and associated articles and both men and women comment serves
to disavow the fact that this is a distinctly male-oriented discourse, in which women are
tolerated only if they play by the rules. They must ignore the misogyny that is “baked into”
the Daily Edge’s discursive tropes and accept the myth that anti-political correctness, (ironic)
sexism, grotesquerie and a self-conscious reveling in adolescent in-jokes are gender-neutral.
By simultaneously domesticating, trivialising and fetishising Love/Hate’s characters – a style
that has filtered over time into mainstream discourse – the show’s Daily Edge, Twitter and
Facebook metatexts have served to channel audience pleasures and expectations through
a set of ideologically narrow lenses that are both phallocentric and culturally insular, while
simultaneously appealing to the notion of a collective national experience.

Notes
1.  Lawson, “Is Love/Hate Ireland’s Answer to The Wire?”
2.  Power, “Writer Carolan’s Flair for Unpredictability has Proved Love/Hate’s Secret Sauce.”
3.  Miriam O'Callaghan, RTÉ Radio 1, May 8, 2013.
4.  Herald.ie, December 7, 2011.
5.  McGuirk, “Love/Hate – Series 2,” 227.
6.  Quinn, “Gender Traps and Genre in the Irish Television Drama Love Hate.”
7.  Nagle, “I wanna Destroy the Passer by,” 228.
8.  Fiske, Television Culture, 125.
9.  Negra, “Adjusting Men and Abiding Mammies.”
10. Negra and Tasker, Gendering the Recession.
11. Negra, “Adjusting Men and Abiding Mammies,” 48.
12. Ging, “New Lads or Protest Masculinities”; Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema.
13. Kimmel, “A Black Woman Took My Job.”
14. Kimmel, Manhood in America; and Tasker and Negra, Gendering the Recession.
15. Negra, “Adjusting Men and Abiding Mammies,” 44.
16. Ibid., 48.
17. Ibid., 55.
18. Ibid., 47.
19. The Irish gangster cycle of the late 1990s/2000s includes I Went Down (1997), Crush Proof (1999),
Flick (2000), Saltwater (2000), Accelerator (2001), The General (1998), Ordinary Decent Criminal
(1999), Last Days in Dublin (2001), Headrush (2002), Intermission (2003), The Halo Effect (2004),
Man About Dog (2004). Dead Bodies (2003), Freeze Frame (2004), In Bruges (2008), Savage (2009)
and Perrier’s Bounty (2009).
20. Negra and Tasker, Gendering the Recession, 2.
21. Chibnall, “Underworld England.”
22. Monk, “From Underworld to Underclass.”
23. Leigh, “Get Smarter.”
24. Messner and Montez de Oca, “The Male Consumer as Loser,” 1882.
25. Chibnall, “Underworld England,” 2.
26. Ging, “New Lads or Protest Masculinities?”
27. Lacey, “One for the Boys?”
28. Strate, “Beer Commercials: A Manual on Masculinity.”
29. Messner and Montez de Oca, “The American Beer Consumer as Loser.”
190   D. GING

30. Ging, Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema, 41.

31. Connell, Masculinities, 111.
32. Savran, Taking It Like a Man.
33. Key examples include Falling Down, The Passion of the Christ, Magnolia, American Beauty, Fight
Club and, more recently, Birdman, Whiplash, Unbroken and Gone Girl.
34. Wardrop, His and Hers.
35. Derrington, Pyjama Girls.
36. Molony, “House and Home: Structuring Absences in Post-Celtic Tiger Documentary.”
37. Carroll, Affirmative Reaction.
38. Ibid., 44.
39. Marwick et al., “Dolphins Are Just Gay Sharks.”
40. Miltner, “There’s No Place for Lulz on LOLCats.”
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 15.
44. Ibid., 34.
45. Nagle, “Not Quite Kicking Off Everywhere.”
46. Negra, “Adjusting Men and Abiding Mammies.”
47. Ibid.
48. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 3.
49. Burgess, “Hearing Ordinary Voices.” Burgess’ concept of “vernacular creativity” describes the
blending of traditional folk activities with contemporary media knowledge and formats.
According to Burgess, these creative practices play a key role in self-representation and
contemporary literacies.
50. Hallam and Marshment, Realism and Popular Cinema, 92.
51. Creeber, “TV Ruined the Movies,” 125.
52. Chibnall, “Underworld England.”
53. Ibid., 3.
54. Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.”
55. Ibid., 3.
56. Whelehan, Overloaded.
57. Attwood, “Tits and Ass and Porn and Fighting.”
58. Ging, “New Lads or Protest Masculinities?”
59. Hughes, “Love/Hate – A Gangster Drama that’s More Addictive than the World Cup.”
60. Negra, “Adjusting Men and Abiding Mammies.”
61. Nagle, An Investigation into Contemporary Online Anti-feminist Movements.
62. Bosco was a children’s television programme on RTÉ in the late 1970s and 1980s.
63. ‘It’s help I need, not hassle’ is a much quoted phrase of Fran’s from S4E1.
64. 10 November 2014.
65. This is a pun-based joke. Bord na Móna is a semi-state company in Ireland responsible for
harvesting peat.
66. Lacey, “One for the Boys?”
67. Monk, “From Underworld to Underclass,” 178.
68. Ibid.
69. 19 October 2014.
70. 5 July 2013.
71. See http://thedailyedge.thejournal.ie/love-hate-exam-funny-1877589-Jan2015/.
72. “Skanger” is a pejorative term for somebody presumed to be from a low social class and to
have questionable taste and morals.
73. Marwick et al., “Dolphins Are Just Gay Sharks,” 643.
74. Miltner, “There’s No Place for Lulz on LOLCats.”
75. Kuipers, “Humor Styles and Symbolic Boundaries.”
76. Meyer, “Humor as a Double–edged Sword.”
77. Negra, “Adjusting Men and Abiding Mammies,” 55.
 IRISH STUDIES REVIEW   191

Fiske, Television Culture.

78. 
79. 
Negra, “Adjusting Men and Abiding Mammies.”
80. 
Novrup Redvall, “‘Dogmas’ for Television Drama.”
81. 
Ibid.
Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption.
82. 
83. 
Miltner, “‘There’s no place for lulz on LOLCats’.”

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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