Happy St. Patrick’s Day to Irish Comedy Queen Ayo Edebiri

By Meghan O'Keefe @megsokay
Published March 17, 2024, 8:00 a.m. ET

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St. Patrick's Day

No one deserves to be honored more this St. Patrick’s Day than reigning Irish-American comedy princess Ayo Edebiri. The Bear and Bottoms star became the toast of Ireland this past year and it’s her day to shine.

Now if you’re not terminally online, you might be wondering how the Boston-born daughter of a Nigerian dad and Barbadian mom has come to be so enthusiastically adopted by the people of Ireland. Well, after joking to Letterboxd that she lived in Ireland for four months while playing Jenny the donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin, it became a running joke that Edebiri was, in fact, from Ireland. The Irish Independent has dubbed her an “honorary Irish princess” and The Irish Times has published that they are “proud” to call Edebiri Irish. The Bear star has returned the honor, proudly repping her fake homeland of Ireland during her Critics Choice Awards acceptance speech, and giving shoutouts to various Irish counties and cities on the Emmys red carpet:

Still, if you’re not ethnically Irish, you could still be befuddled over why this has happened. How does a non-Irish American comedian crack a joke about playing a donkey and become universally upheld as a cultural icon by an entire nation and its descendants? After all, she just seems to be doubling down on a silly gag.

And that, right there, is the reason the Irish love Ayo Edebiri. The only thing the Irish love more than Guinness, poetry, and breeding ourselves across the globe, is committing hard to the bit.

The Irish have a storied history with humor, but I sometimes think it’s slightly misunderstood. Sure, it’s a way for us to make light of the tragedies we experience, but it’s also a way to display our devotion. For instance, I half-ironically got really into garden gnomes as a teenager. It was just kind of a silly joke. My older sister then began gifting me gnomes at Christmas time, adopting a devilish, teasing aura when I unwrapped them, as if to say:”You don’t really like gnomes, you’re just trying to be quirky. Better happily accept this or we’ll know you’re full of shit.” She continued to do this into my twenties. During the pandemic, she even sent me a care package with three little gnomes tucked inside. It was her way of saying that she cared about me, that she remembered this little bit I had. Now I earnestly like getting those damn gnomes because it’s our bit.

The dark side of this intense level of commitment can be seen, ironically enough, in the aforementioned The Banshees of Inisherin. Brendan Gleeson’s character Colm is so set on staying true to his word — that he’ll cut off his fingers rather than stay friends with Colin Farrell’s Padraic — that he ends up mutilating himself. I wasn’t confused at all why he cut off his fingers. He said he was going to do it, so he had to do it. A distinctly Irish thing to do.

The effervescently bright side of this cultural need to commit to a bit, no questions asked, can be beautifully seen in last month’s viral video of a young man from Kerry and his sister shoving their “fadder into a balloon.”

If you watch the whole video, you’ll note that at no point does anyone stop and ask, “Why are we doing this?” (Okay, the sister does yell, “WHAT’S HAPPENING?” but that’s after she’s already committed herself to pulling a giant balloon over her tiny father’s shoulders. She’s in it, guys.) Tadhg Flemming simply declares he’s going to shove his father into a balloon and the family rallies together to make it happen. It’s blissful. It’s nonsensical. It is…love. When you all commit to a bit, you are committing to each other, and that’s literally love.

Which leads me back to the reason why the nation of Ireland and all her children love Ayo Edebiri and claim her as one of our own. Ayo has committed to the bit. Every time she claims Ireland as her home, she becomes more Irish. She exhibits an intrinsic understanding of a deeply felt Irish cultural touchstone. If she suddenly stopped shouting out her people in Derry, Cork, Killarney, and Dublin and complained that, guys, she’s not really Irish, then we would turn on her. However, the fact that she’s not only rolled with the joke, but kept it up simply makes her all the more endearing.

Ayo Edebiri is simply the most Irish comedian in world this St. Patrick’s Day weekend.