Why do we let Saturday Night Live get away with lazy Paddywhackery?

Comics dressed as Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson and jabbered away incoherently on the champagne carpet before shuffling off.

The red-carpet host turned to the camera and exclaimed: “Wow, and they haven’t even started drinking yet.”

Yeesh. Predictably, the joke did not go down well with Irish people, including Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, who shared the clip on social media with a facepalm emoji.

People also pointed out that it was a little tasteless to make a ‘you’re all degenerate drunks!’ gag when Farrell has very openly spoken about alcoholism and being sober for 20 years.

We all know this is not the first time SNL has run sketches with pantomime stage Oirishness. They have previous form for doing so.

In 2017, Saoirse Ronan got roped into an abysmal Aer Lingus sketch which featured lilting brogues, Aran jumpers, dogs on an airport runway with ‘the soul of Oscar Wilde’, and jokes about everyone in the country eating potatoes.

There was a lot of push-back and digital eye rolls.

In fact, Ronan was asked about it on The Late Late Show where she told host Ryan Tubridy she was absolutely not ‘anti Aer Lingus’ and did in fact ‘collect her points’. Good woman.

But this fiddeldy-dee ‘sure aren’t we all eejits?’ depiction of Ireland seems to be popular with SNL writers and performers.

In 2018, a few months after the Aer Lingus sketch and just in time for St Patrick’s Day, they performed a sketch about an Irish dating show called, you guessed it, ‘Kiss Me I’m Irish’.

It was a blind-date-style set-up with a bachelor “choosing between three Irish roses to see which smells the sweetest”.

The jokes centred around having freckles and being a perpetual shade of puce, valuing women who stay in the kitchen, and harbouring a desire to sleep with your relatives.

“You’re cousins?” one wide-eyed character asked in a Wild Mountain Thyme style accent. “How am I supposed to compete with that?”

Of course, it goes without saying that if these jokes were made on UK shows, there would immediately be demands for statements of contrition.

But across the Atlantic, comedy writers seem to have agreed there is something of a hall pass when it comes to hokey Irish stereotypes, which really sits at odds with the way SNL repositioned itself in recent years as a liberal-leaning show.

The Oirish-y SNL sketches raise several questions: are the SNL producers trolling us? Do they know this gets a rise and enjoy watching Irish people become irate on social media? Do they simply not care?

Personally, I find it hard to get too offended about these jokes.

I’m more confused than anything else. They’re just so lazy, boring and out of date. A mix of Bernard Manning punchlines with a dash of begorrah whimsy thrown in. Surely they could come up with something better?

Look, being on the butt of a bad SNL sketch is not the end of the world — life moves on and we forget about them. But what is depressing is when you see those clichés bleeding out elsewhere.

Be it Kimmel joking about Irish nominees brawling on stage at the Oscars or President Joe Biden ‘joking’ in Delaware that, “I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid”.

Man. All of these sketches and lines are unfunny and trite.

If you’re going to take a pop at us, go for broke, but at least say something original.