David William Sheehan writes: I learned to read power from a puppet throwing toast. Most afternoons of my Irish childhood ended in front of The Den with Zig and Zag, two aliens on a couch, telling each other and occasionally the nation to feck off; Dustin, a turkey, who would later stand for the presidency and poll better than the joke deserved; and Soky, who lived in a laundry basket. Nothing about it was educational in any sense an inspector would have recognised. It was loud, rude, anarchic and completely beloved, and a whole generation of us sat there after school being formed – though if you had told us we were being formed, we would have thrown toast at you too.

Authority is safest to needle, and funniest, from underneath a couch cushion. But where did that reflex come from? It did not arrive with the puppets. RTÉ did not invent it in a studio in the 1980s. They inherited it, the way you inherit a grammar – already fluent, already structural long before anyone teaches you the rule. The puzzle is why Irish adults, who may have smacked a child for talking back at the table, allowed that same child to watch a television programme that did nothing but talk back and called it entertainment. I do not think it was carelessness. I think it was recognition. They knew the shape of the joke because they had been raised on it themselves, two or three generations back, in a country where saying the true thing plainly could get you transported, excommunicated or simply ignored. But saying it sideways, inside a joke, could not.

Jonathan Swift knew the trick. In 1729 A Modest Proposal recommended that the children of the Irish poor be fattened and sold for food. The horror was not in the exaggeration. It was in the mimicry. Swift put on the cold ledger-voice of empire so faithfully, and without a flinch, that the reader nodding along for even a sentence found the problem already inside them. That is the mechanism of satire, and it is more demanding than it looks. It does not tell you what to think; it makes you do the thinking by leaving a gap between what is said and what is meant and trusting you to notice you have fallen into it.

It is worth pausing on how strange a pedagogical tool that is. A straight lesson hands you the conclusion. A joke such as Swift’s withholds it, so that arriving at the conclusion yourself becomes the lesson. You cannot be taught that a system is monstrous from outside the system’s own language; you have to be walked through the language and feel where it breaks. Which is presumably why it outlasts empires, censors and Sunday sermons better than the straight version ever does. Tell a censor’s office this is satire and they will often wave it through, not noticing that the wave-through is the proof the trick worked.

I do not think The Den knew it was doing any of this, and that is the part I keep returning to. Nobody at RTÉ sat down with Swift’s essay and built a children’s programme out of it. The puppets were not satirising any one thing – there was no minister, no church, no specific target, just a couch and a turkey and the permission to be rude. But permission was the whole inheritance. Centuries of practising the trick on bishops and landlords and district inspectors had left behind not the targets, which came and went, but the muscle. And a muscle does not need a target to keep working. It just needs somewhere to flex. The Den gave it a couch.

Compare it with Sesame Street, from the same decade, which knew exactly what it was doing. The Carnegie Corporation funded the research; the Children’s Television Workshop tested every sketch on children before broadcast; Gerald Lesser and Ed Palmer mapped each scene against a cognitive milestone. It was a social experiment dressed as a puppet show, and an honest one. When southern stations refused to run an integrated cast, the producers held the line. Sesame Street trusted children with answers. The Den trusted them with irreverence. One took it as given that the job of the adult world was to instruct; the other that the job of the child was to see through it. Sesame Street tested its curriculum on the children it claimed to serve. The Den never tested anything because it had no curriculum to test – only a country’s old habit, running on autopilot, which may be the more interesting case precisely because nobody designed it. Formation does not require an architect. Sometimes it just requires three centuries of practice and an empty half hour before tea.

What did it teach underneath the chaos? Not civics and not history. It taught that the people in charge of the room (and a television studio is a room with people in charge of it) could be mocked to their faces without the world ending. That the mockery was survivable. I cannot prove that a generation of Irish adults grew up readier to laugh at a taoiseach or a bishop because a turkey once ran for president. But the country that produced The Den also produced Father Ted, which was written by men who had grown up on exactly that diet.

Father Ted made clowns of priests in a country that had until recently treated the collar as close to untouchable, and it did so without a single character ever saying the quiet part aloud. The joke was never that the church is corrupt. The joke was three priests, marooned on an island, being petty and vain and a little stupid in exactly the ways the rest of us are. It gave a country permission to see the men under the collars as men, and once you have seen that, the reverence does not switch off but begins to ask questions of itself.

Kneecap do the same work in a different register. They switch between Irish and English mid-line, mid-joke, and the switch itself is the content – you laugh, then notice what you laughed at, then realise that noticing it required you to already know which language carried which history. A fifteen-second clip needs that fluency to land. Nobody signed up to be trained in colonial language politics by a rap group, and that is rather the point: the training happened anyway, riding in on the joke, the way it always has.

What Swift, The Den, Father Ted and Kneecap share is not a politics. It is a mechanism. Withhold the conclusion, make the audience close the gap and trust that the act of closing it does something the straight sentence could not. Sometimes what it does is puncture a bishop. Sometimes it hardens a stereotype. The mechanism does not care which.

I still do not fully know why this country built the reflex so deep into its children’s television. Colonial history explains some of it; three hundred years of saying the true thing sideways leaves a habit, the way a limb favoured for an old injury keeps the limp long after it has healed. But other colonised places have their satirists; not all of them hand a five-year-old the remote and let the puppets run the country into the ground every afternoon with the government’s blessing.

Maybe that is just the shape Irish wit happened to take. Maybe it is closer to what bell hooks meant when she said laughter could be survival, that a country needing the joke to survive for centuries kept making it long after the original danger had passed, the way you keep a key to a house you no longer live in. I do not have the ending to that thought. But I have found one place where it stops being abstract.

I run schools now, which is to say I have become one of the institutions The Den taught me to distrust. Some mornings I stand in front of a few hundred children who are presumably doing to me exactly what I did to the television, reading the gap between what I say and what I am, working out how seriously to take me. I do not mind. I think it may even be the point. The most Irish thing The Den ever taught me is that the only authority worth having is the kind that can survive being laughed at – that the deflation is not the enemy of an institution but its examination, and that the people who cannot bear it are usually the ones with the most to hide.

And yet I am, most days, the one left in the room after the laughing stops, when the thing still needs saying straight – and that is half of the tradition never quite taught. We got very good, all of us, from Swift to Father Ted to Kneecap to a puppet flinging toast, at the art of not quite saying the thing and trusting the audience to hear it anyway. What I am less sure of, is what you do once the joke has done its work, the room has gone quiet and someone still has to stand up and say the thing plainly. I was sitting in front of that television and something was being taught, but none of us would ever have called it a lesson. I am still not certain it taught me the harder half.