Is Ayo Edebiri Irish? A guide to the internet’s best joke.
Ayo Edebiri is a supremely talented actor and comedian. She’s quickly become a person whose mere presence in a project likely makes it worth watching.
The Bear? Beautiful, moving, stressful, and, at times, hilarious. Theater Camp? No business being as stupendously funny as it was. Bottoms? Fantastic film.
But she’s also funny in a way that comic geniuses from a different era might not be able to pull off. She’s clearly a person well-versed in how the internet works who enjoys a good online bit. She has a sense of humor that works on the internet. And, importantly, she understands that committing to a bit only makes it funnier.
And that’s how we got to Ayo Edebiri being Ireland’s favorite daughter. You see, back in March, Edebiri joked with a Letterboxd interviewer that she played Jenny the donkey in the Irish film The Banshees of Inisherin. Edebiri, slipping into a pretty solid Irish accent, joked about spending months on all fours, working her, ahem, tail off in the role. This, of course, was just a bit. But a funny one.
“I lived in Ireland for about four months, and I got really in character, and I was on all fours for four months, and it was really painful, but beautiful, as well,” she joked.
But she has stuck with that bit. And Irish folks have loved it. Edebiri, who is actually from Boston, thanked the country after winning a Critics’ Choice award. She also shouted out Irish cities and her Irish brethren at the Emmys this week, which is how a lot of people learned about the bit.
“Shoutout to my people! Shoutout to Derry! Shoutout to Cork! Shoutout to Killarney! Shoutout to Dublin!” Edebiri said in an interview.
The bit has fully caught on. When Edebiri was nominated for the BAFTA Rising Star Award, for instance, the Twitter / X account @filmindublin ran with the joke, claiming her as an Irish great.
From there the jokes have kept on coming. It’s a good bit, and honestly, some wholesome internet fun.
And it’s not the first time Edebiri pulled off something like this. She had large swaths of the world believing she was the showrunner behind FX’s Kominsky Method simply because it seemed like a funny idea. Edebiri sort of just mentioned it in interviews and her bio and…it worked.
“I just thought what an incredible world that would be if a young Black woman in her mid-20s created this show where Michael Douglas and Allan Arkin are acting,” she said on The Late Show. “Have I watched a single episode? No. But I already get the gist, you know what I mean?”
So if you see Edebiri in a project you should probably watch it, but just maybe don’t believe all of her supposed biographical information on the internet.