The Joke That Doesn’t Travel: Understanding KNEECAP

KNEECAP are being mythologised as revolutionary icons, spoken of in the same breath as punk legends and protest rappers. But the comparison doesn’t hold. The misunderstanding says more about the outside world than it does about them. 

They only really make sense if you’re from Northern Ireland. 

Everywhere else, the reaction is muddled. Some treat them like anti-imperialist icons. Others see them as dangerous provocateurs. Both readings miss the reality. KNEECAP are the product of a very specific place, shaped by the very specific trauma of a post-conflict society where humour is dark, symbols are loaded, and irony is a survival skill. 

Here, we know they’re performing. We also know they’re pushing it. 

When they formed in 2017, it wasn’t a political project. It was a wind-up, a stoned, sharp-edged, gleeful parody of both hip-hop and Republican iconography. The name alone was designed to provoke. Their lyrics swerved between Irish slang, drug culture, and anti-establishment one-liners. There was no manifesto, just mischief. It was funny and pointed, if you were in on the joke. 

But satire is delicate. And KNEECAP keep testing the limits. 

In Northern Ireland, the humour lands because we understand the emotional architecture behind it. We grew up surrounded by the symbols they now play with: balaclavas, murals, slogans. Sectarian jokes muttered under breath. We’ve lived through the absurdity of peace processes and paramilitary ceasefires, and communities still scarred by "the past." So when KNEECAP play that back to us, louder and weirder, it feels familiar. 

But increasingly, some fans, especially outside the North, aren’t laughing with the band. They’re nodding along too seriously. They take it all at face value. They miss the satire and amplify the swagger. The wink becomes a war cry. A staged rebellion becomes a brand. The irony curdles. And that’s when things get uncomfortable. 

In Northern Ireland, people are offended by KNEECAP. And rightly so. They’ve leaned hard into IRA nostalgia. They reference kneecapping, celebrate rioters, joke about petrol bombs. This isn’t harmless cheek. It’s charged. And while plenty here enjoy the performance, others have real reasons to recoil. Not just the unionist community, although many are deeply alienated by the imagery - but also people within nationalist and Republican backgrounds who feel the band are trivialising real suffering, real trauma, and real consequences. 

One member of KNEECAP, Liam Ó hAnnaidh (Mo Chara), appeared in a UK court in June 2025 on charges under the Terrorism Act, after allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag and chanting in support of Hezbollah during a London concert in November 2024. He denies the charges and has been released on unconditional bail ahead of a scheduled hearing in August. The case is ongoing. These aren’t just aesthetic games. The symbols they play with are not relics or empty gestures. They are live political signals, some of which carry serious legal consequences. 

Naoise and Liam are ceasefire babies. Born in the late 1990s, just after the guns were meant to go quiet, they grew up in an uneasy peace. The murals were still there. The divisions were still mapped onto every postcode. But the narrative had shifted. Their generation didn’t inherit direct trauma; they inherited symbols, stories, and silences. They weren’t dodging bombs, but they were raised under the shadow of what had come before. That’s what gives their work its strange mix of distance and intensity. They’re playing with fire they didn’t light but grew up beside. 

Being a ceasefire baby in the North means living with ghosts no one explains. It means hearing half-truths at the dinner table, watching comedy that feels like code, and picking through a peace that never quite delivered what it promised. You inherit a kind of second-hand grief, along with all the sarcasm needed to carry it. KNEECAP aren’t trying to solve that. They’re translating it- loudly. 

The humour that shaped them is post-conflict humour. It’s gallows wit. It’s the kind of dark, knowing sarcasm that emerges in societies where absurdity and trauma coexist. It comes from funerals and stand-offs and murals and kids too young to remember the Troubles but shaped by them anyway. 

In Northern Ireland, we know how to sit with contradiction. We know someone can be half-joking and deadly serious in the same sentence. That’s the register KNEECAP work in. But once they stepped onto the international stage, that register started getting scrambled. 

It’s one thing to shout “Get Your Brits Out” at Féile an Phobail. It’s another when American fans start chanting it with stars in their eyes, imagining themselves part of a righteous revolutionary struggle. Suddenly, the joke isn’t funny anymore - or at least not in the way it was intended. 

The media eats it up. A rebellious Irish-speaking rap group in balaclavas is clickbait gold. Whether it’s the Guardian framing them as freedom fighters or glossy broadsheets quoting them like prophets, it all feeds the myth. But what gets lost is the complexity. The fact that these lads aren’t cartoon radicals. They’re smart. They know they’re playing with fire. And sometimes they do so carefully. Like when they unveiled their now-famous West Belfast mural and invited The Mary Wallopers, a trad-punk band whose members are two-thirds Protestant, hat tip to the Hendy’s, to perform. That wasn’t a random choice. It was a statement. And a good one. But no one outside Northern Ireland notices that part. They see the tricolours, the slogans, the chaos, and they either swoon or condemn. Either way, they miss the context. 

What happened at Glastonbury this weekend exposed something rotten. On the same stage, Bob Vylan led chants of “death to the IDF.” CMAT dedicated her set to “the Palestinian martyrs.” And KNEECAP shouted out Palestine Action, a group banned by the UK government, before telling a roaring crowd to “fuck Keir Starmer.” It wasn’t resistance. It was performance. Carefully staged, knowing exactly what it would provoke. And it worked. Across the weekend, artists blurred the line between legitimate protest and open incitement. Free Palestine flags filled the air, but so did slogans that called for the eradication of Israel and the casual dehumanisation of Jews. 

The irony is unbearable. This was a music festival in the UK, cheering acts that praised or aligned themselves with movements linked to the Nova Festival massacre - where 378 people were murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and 44 were taken hostage while dancing at a rave in the desert. Nearly two years on, 16 are still being held in Gaza, some confirmed dead, others clinging to life in captivity. A party turned slaughter. And in Somerset, nearly two years later, we watched a festival celebrate its own moral clarity by ignoring that reality entirely. 

The BBC, instead of holding the line, pulled KNEECAP’s live stream. In doing so, it walked straight into the trap. KNEECAP got exactly what they wanted - censorship to hold up as proof of their radical authenticity, silence they could frame as oppression. But there was nothing brave about any of it. The BBC looked spineless. KNEECAP looked smug. And Glastonbury, once a place of joy, defiance, and shared humanity, became a stage for something far more hollow. A festival so desperate to appear righteous, it handed the microphone to people who would burn the whole concept of universal rights to the ground. 

What gets flattened in all this is the complexity. KNEECAP’s appeal abroad depends on a kind of lazy binary: if you are not the state, you must be the oppressed. If you are Irish, you must be anti-colonial. If you are anti-colonial, you must support every other so-called resistance movement. This is moral tourism, not political thought. Just because you are not one thing does not automatically make you the other. And yet, the simplicity of that framing allows all nuance to be discarded. When KNEECAP shout about British rule or Palestine or revolution, their overseas fans fill in the blanks with their own assumptions. But Northern Ireland’s politics were never simple. Our pain doesn’t divide neatly into oppressed and oppressor. Our jokes aren’t universal. Our rebellion wasn’t pure. And our cultural references don’t belong on a T-shirt. 

I should say I’m not a typical commentator on any of this. I didn’t grow up in a bog-standard Republican household, nor was I raised with loyalist iconography on the mantelpiece. I’m ‘half a Jaffa’ by background, one of those Belfast kids with a foot in both camps, shaped by a kind of cultural split-screen. My references were always blurred. I know what a tricolour means. I also know how it can look to someone who’s spent their life under a Union Jack. That double perspective, that sideways way of seeing, is part of why I find KNEECAP fascinating. And part of why I don’t always buy the performance. 

KNEECAP are at their best when they’re being self-aware, when they use humour to challenge the pieties of both states, North and South. When they mock the hypocrisy of power, or point out the absurdity of paramilitary nostalgia, or rap in Irish about dodgy landlords and cultural gatekeepers. That’s when the joke works. 

But when they drift into uncritical bombast, when they platform Hezbollah or posture about Iran, they stop being satirists and start becoming amplifiers for something much darker. This isn’t rebellion anymore. It’s alignment with regimes and movements that trample human rights, that crush dissent, that persecute women and minorities. It’s not clever. It’s not necessary. And it undermines the credibility they’ve built by being bold and local and irreverent. 

Let me be absolutely clear: I support free speech. But free speech doesn’t mean celebrating violence or turning a blind eye to those who traffic in it. The right to speak doesn’t come with the right to be applauded when you’re glorifying tyranny or pretending that foreign militant groups are freedom fighters. It’s not radical. It’s reckless. And KNEECAP should know better. 

They’re a cultural lightning rod, not saviours, not villains. Just performers who emerged from a place still haunted by its history, still fluent in double-speak, still figuring itself out. Their rise says as much about the global hunger for rebellion as it does about Northern Ireland. But they only make full sense when you’ve lived among the contradictions they’re riffing off. 

They don’t need to be explained. But they do need to be understood. 

And that gets harder the further away you are. 

Because, like so much about this place, 

you had to be here.