A Bird Done a Shit

Look, I’m not above laughing at crude and rude comedy. I’ve been known to enjoy, on occasion, what you might call “toilet humor.” I laughed at this, and if you’ve got a soul in your body, you will too.

Let me translate a little for Americans. Junior Cert is, I’m reliably informed, an exam that Irish pupils take when they’re in the 9th grade. The Irish Informant tells me they’re akin to British GCSE exams, which are like OWLs in Harry Potter. You get me!

Like GCSEs and OWLs, these exams tend to be taken not in the classroom under your regular teacher’s glare but supervised by outside examiners in an exam hall. At my school the exam hall was a very depressing, grey-green, airplane hangar-style gym with no natural light, which I still have nightmares about.

“RE” is Religious Education. It was RSE in the UK, but I don’t remember what the “S” stood for.

And then there is the pigeon.

My Irish Informant—he’s named Colm, and sadly does not know the hot priest from Fleabag—went to St Mary’s and tells us: “It’s traditionally used for basketball. And so it’s fairly high, at least a big two stories.”

Think about what this means. One imagines the pigeon was perched in the rafters when he vacated his birdly bowels, so the Deposit would pick up quite a velocity as it sped towards a poor student’s remarks upon Christian ethics and Aquinas. You have to image there would be a significant sideways trajectory, perhaps even an upwards splash onto the student’s jumper.

You have to applaud the structure of this tweet—not actually saying what happened, but implying an incredibly funny story. The tweet is not telling us that the pigeon incident happened, but that the students won’t lose marks for handing in a literally shitty paper. That is pure, classic comedy.

Did the St. Mary’s tweeter know they were crafting such a perfect joke tweet? I dunno. But God bless the wee pigeon for shitting on a religious studies paper and, I can only guess, filling some stressed-out Irish kids’ hearts with joy.