When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

Behan’s line turns a grim political reality—being condemned by a clandestine or quasi-military tribunal—into a piece of mordant comedy. By repeating “in my absence,” he exposes the absurdity and procedural hollowness of a sentence imposed without the accused present, then punctures its menace with a defiant quip: if the authorities can condemn him without him, they can execute him without him too. The joke functions as bravado and critique at once, characteristic of Behan’s public persona: irreverent, anti-authoritarian, and unwilling to grant solemnity to institutions he regarded as hypocritical or theatrical. It also hints at the precariousness of revolutionary politics, where symbolic gestures and rhetoric can eclipse practical justice.