If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.

The line is a barbed comic stereotype: even when fortune literally “rains soup,” the Irish are imagined as so unlucky, improvident, or perverse that they would bring the one tool (forks) least suited to benefit from it. Read more broadly, it works as a joke about self-sabotage and the mismatch between opportunity and preparedness—how people (or nations) can be positioned to receive good luck yet fail through habit, bad planning, or fatalism. In Behan’s mouth it also fits his persona of caustic, pub-ready wit, using exaggeration to provoke laughter while hinting at harsher truths about poverty, colonial history, and the way outsiders caricature Irish life.