THESE DAYS ONLY THE Irish are allowed to tell Irish jokes. So give thanks that, despite being London-born, Julian Gough was raised in Co Tipperary and has all the right antecedents. For Jude: Level 1is the ultimate Irish joke.

On the cover, the comedian Tommy Tiernan declares it “the best comic novel I have ever read”. This rather put me off, but when I found myself laughing out loud yet again, and still only on page 6, it seemed almost an understatement.

The first sentence – “If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the Mob would never have burnt down the Orphanage” – is right up there as a favourite opening alongside Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers (“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me”), and it only gets better.

Gough unashamedly draws on well-established comic traditions – his Jude is an innocent abroad, a Candide, a Don Quixote or a Tom Jones, unintentionally spreading mayhem wherever he goes. The plot is basic: on his 18th birthday, Jude receives a letter revealing “the secret of his birth”. Inevitably it is lost after a misunderstanding at a “hat-throwing rally” when Jude unintentionally profanes a bog-hole sacred to Eamon de Valera, a mob attacks his orphanage and the letter (and, indeed, the monk holding it), are encased in molten lead from the burning roof, leaving only three cryptic words.

So Jude heads for Galway city (“the Sodom of the West”) where he falls in love with a chip-shop girl, who rejects him unless he gets plastic surgery to look like Leonardo DiCaprio and makes a million. His quest to win her sees him mistaken for Stephen Hawking, shot at on an iceberg moored off an island belonging to Charles Haughey, leading a revolt of slaves to a telecoms company, having plastic surgery after an explosion (acquiring DiCaprio’s face and an erectile nose and setting up a familiar finale when the ferry to England strikes the iceberg).

But knockabout comedy needs a harder edge too and Gough is satisfyingly scathing about modern Ireland’s boom times. He mocks its parochialism and dependence on EU money – “Grateful as we are for the Europeans, we should never forget that they are a shower of foreign bastards who would murder us in our beds given half a chance,” one politician declares. Its sentimentality is another target: “Dear dirty Dublin,” he writes, “unchanged for a thousand years – apart from the massacre of its original inhabitants by the Vikings, the decline of the Vikings . . . the crushing of the Celts by the Norman foe . . .” and so on for two pages until: “Dear dirty Dublin, entirely unchanged.”

The Catholic Church, xenophobia, petty corruption, the venality accompanying the “Celtic Tiger” economy all fall under his withering eye (“Galway is not the same without the auld swans on the Corrib.” “What happened to the swans?” “I sold them to the Yanks”).

There are hints of Flann O’Brien. In one marvellous scene, Jude as Hawking accidentally explains the theory of relativity in terms of a pay packet being passed among greedy executives; in another a character threatens to sue the Church for abusing its monopoly, forcing smaller gods out of business.

Don’t be put off by the concentration on Irish affairs – Jude’s quest continues in Level 2and Level 3,when our hapless hero takes on England and America. If, like me, you can’t wait to revel in the comic invention, the story is available online in instalments at www.oldstreetpublishing.co. uk, before an omnibus next year.

Don’t miss it – the jokes quoted here are only the tip of the iceberg.

Jude: Level 1 by Julian Gough

Old Street, £7.99; 190pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £7.19 (free p&p)

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