If you ask Joe Cuddy, he’ll tell you there are folks in Ireland who believe that Jesus wasn’t a Jew. They’ll argue he was an Irishman and back it up by saying, “He had to be Irish. At 33, he was single, unemployed and still living with his mother. Plus he had 12 drinking buddies.”

Before you get offended, you should know that a whole gang of clad-in-green Irish Catholics found the joke immensely amusing when they heard it last night at the Bangor Civic Center. That’s where this year’s local celebration of St. Patrick’s Day unofficially began with an evening of Irish entertainment presented by singers Tony Kenny and Catherine Coates, and comedian Joe Cuddy.

Of course, not everyone in the audience was Irish, but Kenny took care of that with his first song. “Let ye all be Irish tonight,” he crooned.

Kenny gave the stage over to Coates, a Dubliner, who sang “My Irish Molly,” “Down By the Surry Gardens” and “Ave Maria,” for which she received a standing ovation.

Then Cuddy, dressed in a green sports coat and green bow tie, took over the stage with his punchy brand of Irish humor. He confessed he was having a bad day: A button fell off his shirt, his shoelace broke, the handle fell off his briefcase. “I was afraid to go to the bathroom,” he teased and then paused before adding, “in case my teeth fell out.”

Cuddy told plenty of jokes about wives and other women, about Riley, Murphy and Hannigan, and about himself. In Ireland, he said, he’s world-famous. He compared Irish humor to Jewish humor, and told stories about a marriage between a Jewish woman and an Irishman. (The choir sang “Oy Vey Maria” at the wedding.)

Later in the show, Kenny returned to sing several contemporary Irish ballads such as “Through the Eyes of an Irishman,” “The Town I Loved So Well” and “My Son.” He led the audience in a singalong of “Galway Bay,” but paid tribute to most of the old jigs and ballads in a series of medleys. His biggest numbers of the evening weren’t Irish tunes, but lilting, trilling versions of songs from the Broadway hit “The Phantom of the Opera.”

The evening won lots of cheers from this older-something audience. Anyone who was expecting hard-core Irish melodies might have been disappointed in this show, which has more in common stylistically with Las Vegas than with Ireland. Kenny even looks a little like Wayne Newton. And he certainly sings with a musical embellishment that puts the best of American schmaltz singers to shame, particularly when the instrumental backup is an electric piano and electric guitars.

But the night was about that little bit of heaven that fell from the sky one day. The Green Island. The Emerald Isle. Ireland and the Irish. Which, of course, everyone was last night — even those who didn’t wear green.

For those who missed out on last night’s blarney, St. Patrick’s Day officially begins later in the week with a traditional Irish dinner and music presented by the Irish Society of Maine March 15 at the Old Town Elks Club, and then, of course, there’s Mass on Sunday, which is, indeed, the feast day of St. Patrick.