When I moved to Scotland two years ago, the ethos committee at my son’s new school provided guidance on dress and behavior codes: no racist slogans, nothing sexist or likely to provoke antagonism, no discriminating against religious minorities (there is a growing Muslim community here) and no football colors.

Their last instruction left me dumbfounded. As we wandered this new city, we noticed signs posted on bar doors, public buildings and even the student cafeteria also referring to the ban on football colors. Coming from New Zealand with its history of racially-situated gang violence, I was familiar with a ban on gang patches, but football colors? How could a fan’s soccer shirt cause so much grief?

The answer is simple: We’d moved to Glasgow. Politically, financially and culturally - on and off the field - just two teams, the Glasgow Rangers and Celtic, dominate the Premier League and the whole Scottish football scene. This pair does battle twice a year plus (inevitably) cup and league finals, monopolizing both media coverage and public consciousness.

Perhaps the fervor with which Scots worship soccer might tempt a fundamentalist vocabulary, but such crude religious similes are unnecessary. For these two “Old Firms’ (so named for being the oldest teams in the city) have been associated with sectarian divisiveness since their earliest days in the 1870s. Protestants were for the Glasgow Rangers and the Catholic minority supported Celtic. Although each team now includes players from ‘the other side,” fans, investors and social expectations still align strongly with historical traditions. Worse, some fans view expressing sectarian bigotry through vandalism and physical violence as their right, or even their duty. God forbid, if you’ll pardon the expression, that you should be wearing Celtic’s green-and-white-hoops in a blue-and-red Ranger’s pub on an “Old Firm derby” afternoon, Glasgow’s soccer clash of the Titans.

Glaswegians tell of days gone by when schoolboys played street football according to sectarian, club-related divisions. These days, brothers supporting opposing teams share bedrooms with one side painted blue and the other green, and children in the park use any available sweaters for goalposts. While these examples might be cited as evidence of improved relations for a new generation of fans, I am left wondering (forgive my cynicism) how long it will take these sure-fire photo opportunities to turn into lasting, good relations on the terraces and in the bars and streets.

It certainly hasn’t happened yet. Fans are rigorously segregated at matches, which unfortunately only increases their ability to organise en masse rituals of provocative chants and songs. After a derby win 18 months ago, a prominent lawyer and famous Rangers executive was videotaped lustily singing the most damnable sectarian song ever written, and although he resigned his role, his club is still reeling from the damage to its reputation. Given that the knives come out at every Old Firm match, literally, songs that reflect and normalize hatred, bigotry and violence must surely be deplored at all levels.

And the team managers do make the effort at times, but old habits die hard. It doesn’t help matters when the traditionally Protestant team brings out a supporter’s shirt in bright orange - as a tribute to the manager’s Dutch origins, they claimed, fooling nobody - in a part of Scotland where the Northern Ireland-derived Orange Order parade their own form of Protestant sectarianism.

Similarly, when Michael Stone - a convicted Loyalist murderer recently released from Northern Ireland’s notorious Maze prison - helps publicize an Old Firm derby, as he did recently, it does nothing to keep bigotry, sectarianism and violence separate from the business of playing, promoting and watching football.

This summary may seem overly critical of Rangers’ management and fans; many are not involved in the antagonism, as one fan’s recent banner offering support to a Celtic player struggling with cancer attests. Similarly, Celtic fans are guilty of taunts and songs and riots and stabbings, too. However, the subordinate social, cultural, political and financial position occupied by Scotland’s Catholic minority is reflected in the football club’s lower status in every domain. Celtic is more powerful than other teams in the Scottish league but it is significantly less powerful - financially, statistically and in all aspects of public perception - than Rangers both on and off the field. Days before the derby, Rangers bought a Norwegian player for “12m (US $18m, paid to his previous team) a cash-flash and show of macho braggadocio that even Celtic cannot match.

So is it any wonder that when the carefully separated fans surge onto the streets after a match there is taunting and scuffles and bloodshed? At least the latest game was held at 1 p.m.; one summer game was played around 6 p.m. and fans spent a long day drinking in tribal bars before looking for a rumble. A few abandoned the idea of watching the match at all. I vividly remember my first Old Firm experience two years ago, amid darkness, falling snow, mounted riot police and thousands of jubilant drunks, all which converged on a cosmopolitan Christmassed-up shopping precinct at 5 p.m. on a December Sunday. We’re lucky here - we need only be concerned about our safety a few days a year. But the incongruence of the Old Firm match and Christmas remains with me as an abiding impression of Glaswegian public life.

These emotions - a wry mixture of anxiety, irony and joviality - are not unfamiliar to Scots since football is a central topic in local humor, and sectarian jokes are commonplace in Glasgow and western Scotland. Not all football jokes involve the power differential between the two sides, but far too many do. Here are some less aggressive examples: When the Aberdonian team’s toaster was confiscated, a version of the Live Aid anthem “Do They Know It’s Christmas Time” was circulated as “Do They Know It’s Breakfast Time” (chorus: “Feed The Dons’). Even jokes that refer to an Old Firm team can be witty rather than bigoted; for example, the tabloid headline “Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious’ appeared when a lower-league, northern semi-rural side deflated the puffed-up city team 3-1. Some critics suspected that joke had been held with a “blank” in for several years, but then in comedy, timing is everything.

It’s even plausible for jokes about Old Firm teams to appear relatively balanced. One example is an edited graphic showing an ape-to-human evolutionary scale with a star striker from each Old Firm club at the extreme ends. This is an interesting joke because it highlights both the polarity of the teams and prompts us to question why these teams are at the ends they are, and why these teams were chosen and not others.

Elsewhere a local stand-up comedian joked: “I should really support Rangers I suppose - well I really should since I’m a Proddy [Protestant] - but I just don’t speak Italian.” Her reference to Rangers’ Italian-born captain Lorenzo Amoruso reflects the team’s addition of imported (Catholic) players, a trait echoed in Celtic’s own broadening team make-up and fan-base.

But on reflection, like the previous joke, her comment invokes and reinforces the strength and central oppositionality of these two teams, since she delivers it wearing a top Celtic player’s shirt. Is she being ironic? Or provocative? How the joke is perceived depends on your position, as potentially neutral or critical jokes can be read unidirectionally to support a bigoted worldview. Here is our substantive problem: Can sectarian humor and its embedded position within Old Firm culture in Glasgow be neutralized and replaced by “positive,” less aggressive jokes?

Cara Henderson hopes so. Her Nil By Mouth charity seeks nothing less than the end of sectarianism in Scotland. Motivated by the death of a 16-year-old friend who was murdered in 1995 for wearing a Celtic shirt, the Nil By Mouth campaign encourages Glaswegians and Scots to consider the links between language and action. Nil By Mouth refers not only to curbing one’s tongue, but also hints at the dire consequences of violent acts. The campaign is financially supported by the Old Firm teams and the local education authority and maintains a high public profile with posters that read: “Sectarian jokes can have you in stitches’ and “Sectarian violence can have grave consequences.” The graphics are just that: graphic images of stitched head wounds and fresh burials.

These posters leave me speechless and depressed. Part of my reaction derives, I think, from having to accept the notion that joking really can lead to violence and death. This is a bitter pill to swallow, not just because I like humor and comedy and would be loath to agree with such a statement if ‘the media” was blamed in some cause/effect matrix, but also because football humor and the Old Firm and sectarian rivalries are elemental here, blended into our atmosphere and breathed in and out each day.

Nil By Mouth approached one Scottish comedian to be its patron, but although he sympathizes with their aims and recognizes that his significant profile can benefit the campaign, he hasn’t decided whether to commit. Acknowledging the rich, deep and gnarled metaphorical seam of gold that is football humor in Scotland, he ponders how acceptable many here would find the reduced value of mining the surface only, as it were. Renaming this seam “fool’s gold” would change very little unless there is a united effort among public commentators to dissociate football from violence and bigotry, and to quash sectarian comedy.

Where other cultural forms work toward high aesthetic goals, humor often reflects society at its ugliest, and sectarian culture is very ugly indeed. Is a move against humor, however distasteful we might find it, really wise? Or even moral? Ought society to police speech, even for progressive, universally beneficial ends? Must we put all joking aside? Although the extremes are all too easy to recognize, the blurry middle-ground limits of what is or is not acceptable humor or behavior induces further liberal paralysis in me.

Perhaps if Rangers and Celtic were more challenged by other Scottish teams and so lost their top positions, perhaps if the much-idolized stars baited each other’s fans less, perhaps if Nil By Mouth were given a higher profile by the clubs, including mentioning it on their Web sites or at their very profitable merchandising outlets, then some progress might be possible. But ultimately what is most needed is the means to extract hatred from difference, a riddle that has bedevilled humanity for millennia. To work such a miracle of enlightenment and change in Scotland’s cradle of football sectarianism, Henderson’s charity will need all her determination, courage and humor.

Rebecca Robinson is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre, Film and TV Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She is writing her dissertation on British television comedy and Scottish audiences.

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