“How far are you going, Pat To America if my arse sticks it!”

The expression “How far are you going, Pat? To America if my arse sticks it!” is a piece of emigrant-train humour in which a grand destination meets a deliberately undignified measure of endurance. Its punchline makes bodily stamina—not money, plans, or certainty—the limit of how far a man can travel.

The Joke and Its Setting

The exchange begins with a question, ‘How far are you going, Pat?’ The narrator identifies it as a joke about men travelling without tickets who had to make for the lavatory whenever the ticket inspector came round. The reply, ‘To America if my arse sticks it!’ enlarges the imagined journey from the train to America, while the recurring dash to the lavatory supplies the joke’s physical premise.

Humour and Emigration

The line’s comic bravado sits against the pressures of migration described around it. In 1953, the narrator recalls, emigration from Ireland was extensive, and many young people left for Britain in search of work. Against that background, the joke gives a precarious journey a swaggering voice: its speaker names an immense destination, but qualifies the ambition with a crude acknowledgment that the body may fail before the journey does. The expression compresses hardship and defiance into a single punchline without disguising the indignity of travelling without a ticket.