This old ‘Sex and the City’ quote about the Northern Ireland Troubles has gone viral and it is an absolute howler
Sex and the City is a modern TV classic, with tons of quotable lines and zingers.
Inevitably, though, some lines don’t land the way they’re meant to – and none more so than one absolute howler from the first season of the show.
This has gone viral before, but since Sex and the City started streaming on Netflix in the US and other parts of the world, a whole new audience is discovering the show’s more, erm, problematic elements.
The episode is question is titled ‘Bay of Married Pigs’, and it’s about how married people treat singletons: with pity, fear and sometimes outright hostility. At the end of the episode – perhaps inspired by a subplot featuring Samantha and an Irish doorman at Charlotte’s apartment building – Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) compares the “war” between marrieds and singles to the “war in Northern Ireland”.
Twitter/X user @RaxKingIsDead shared the clip…
i was not prepared pic.twitter.com/6Lj5EAzELq
— rax ‘leads with her crotch’ king (@RaxKingIsDead) August 18, 2024
…but that short clip doesn’t give the full quote, capturing the true majesty of its cringe awfulness.
To mark the twentieth anniversary of Sex and the City, let’s all take a moment to remember the time Carrie compared the ‘fight between marrieds and singles’ to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. pic.twitter.com/VTbYsTWGhM
— ⭐ amy o’connor ⭐ (@amyohconnor) June 6, 2018
Carrie says (with Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ as background music):
“As I sifted through the rubble of my marriage skirmish, I had a thought. Maybe the fight between marrieds and singles is like the war in Northern Ireland: we’re all basically the same, but somehow we ended up on different sides.”
Wowza.
The clip never fails to get a disbelieving laugh from people online.
1.
there’s only a few things you can count on in life for bliss and one of mine is seeing ppl rediscovering this lil gem over and over again https://t.co/kbwp1E8ibf
— Danielle Olavario (@_d_olavario) August 18, 2024
2.
The Throuples
— Meghan McCarthy (@MeghanMcCarthy_) August 18, 2024
3.
This reminds of when Americans say they’re visiting Ireland and someone ALWAYS says “Oh dude, you need to have an Irish Car Bomb!”
And I have to remind them that those aren’t exactly popular in Ireland on account of them experiencing actual Car Bombs.
— Gav Leaf – This Temple is dedicated to Uranus! (@Gav_Leaf) August 18, 2024
4.
You just know her column would get screenshotted so often for twitter likes if it was real
— Wild Geerters (@steinkobbe) August 18, 2024
5.
Carrie…there are some things you *can* help but wonder
— Sarah Lyn Rogers (@sarahlynwrites) August 20, 2024
6.
same energy pic.twitter.com/XQv9kRujde
— Kendall Roy apologist (@youreS0golden) August 18, 2024
7.
should have never stopped making the singles speak gaelic
— Rockford Moon (@Rockford_Guy) August 18, 2024
8.
This line is second only to when newly-converted Charlotte says “We’re Jews, we’ve been through worse”
— Olivia Witt (@ojwitt) August 18, 2024
9.
carrie: (walking around in a $30,000 outfit thinking about her billionaire boyfriend)
carrie’s voiceover: but maybe single women in new york were experiencing their own kind of genocide https://t.co/eTdgk69EtZ— meisje (@tolstoi_boi) August 18, 2024
10.
I’ve been watching SATC with David and we both kind of feel like there’s an unspoken understanding between the show and the watcher that Carrie is a terrible writer https://t.co/8dOQa2Be3X
— leyla (@leylaaa31) August 18, 2024
11.
i would read carries column religiously i would not put it down because who else would say this https://t.co/X7tlDkWOY2
— sam NOBARA LIVES (@whomisbear) August 18, 2024
12.
This moment in satc is burned into my brain forever https://t.co/vDtqjJ1WI6
— Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair (@rioghnachNiG) August 18, 2024
13.
>Just off to marriage counselling, dear.
< Don’t forget your AK47 pic.twitter.com/Ll5mWeQoCW
— CineMoviPic (@CineMoviPic) August 18, 2024
14.
We’re lucky this didn’t derail the peace process
— Jon Halling (@JonHalling) August 18, 2024
It’s probably just as well we don’t know what Carrie thinks of the Middle East.
