As St. Patrick’s Day approached, the program’s host and producer, Mitch Miller, asked Mr. McGrath if he knew the song “Mother Machree.”

Katherine O’Dell, no Mother Machree, is Ireland’s star of stage and screen.

“Holy Mother Machree!” — sets the stage for a high-difficulty triple rhyme that pulls all the threads of Normand’s character together: “ambitious,” “knishes” and — wait for it — “St. Aloysius.”

“Pence,” Lord continued, “is Irish American and wastes no opportunity to go misty-eyed about his love for the ‘Old Country’ as he lards on his Mother Machree schtick on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Miriam Lord, a columnist for the Irish Times, wrote that Pence “wastes no opportunity to go misty-eyed about his love for the ‘Old Country’ as he lards on his Mother Machree schtick on both sides of the Atlantic.”