A green knitted glove partly covering a paper hand decorated with stars and red-and-white stripes.

Original artwork, not a still

George Carlin

I used to be Irish Catholic; now I’m an American.

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

A short joke about changing identity. The speaker says they used to be Irish Catholic and now they're American, as if one label replaced the other. It plays on how a single word can seem to swallow a whole background.

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