Why we're all craic addicts

10 April 2012

Stand-up comedy is not dead, it has just turned green. In recent years there has been a veritable tsunami of Irish comedians. Perrier Award winners include Sean Hughes, Dylan Moran and Tommy Tiernan. Owen O'Neill, Jason Byrne, Ed Byrne and a little leprechaun called Graham Norton were all shortlisted.

Then there's Ardal O'Hanlon who went from winning the Hackney Empire New Act Of The Year to Father Ted. It feels as if Ireland only produces boy bands, Eurovision winners and brilliant comedians.

The latest star surfing this wave is Dara O'Briain. The mathematical physics graduate from County Wicklow can currently be seen evoking the spirit of Ben Elton as the host of BBC2's Live Floor Show. Every Saturday the ursine O'Briain - pronounced O'Bree-an - produces sparkling, boxfresh material with enviable ease.

On St Patrick's Day it is back to the day job, when the 31-year-old brings last year's hit Edinburgh Festival show to the Soho Theatre. If you thought stand-up was on its last legs O'Briain will restore your faith. He's a traditional comic in the best sense, spinning quickfire yarns about everything - Mick McCarthy's bust-up with Roy Keane, texting and in an extended riff of genius, his grandmother's funeral. Connie O'Briain was a scion of the pre-Second World War IRA and O'Briain paints a touching, hilarious picture of her life as a freedom fighter.

The political content rarely causes offence, though there was a nervous moment in Liverpool. 'These lads said their mate serving in Ireland had been killed by a tree that fell on him. I said, "Did the IRA plant it?" They laughed and said, "Aah, you know that one, then.'"

O'Briain invariably works on St Patrick's Day, though rarely back home. 'I've always ended up doing ex-pat gigs in Prague and Australia. There's a St Patrick's Day show in Botswana but I've not made it there. Ireland has only recently caught up. Majorettes would march with their batons frozen to their hands in grim parades, but when we realised the rest of the world was having a party we co-opted it.'

Not all the foreign nights have been instant hits, though. 'In Shanghai there were 12 mandarin Chinese speakers in the front row who went as part of their English lessons. I'm not the person to learn English from.' In fact, when O'Briain first moved to London in 2000, having made his name at home on the satirical panel game Don't Feed The Gondolas, he had to slow down his delivery. 'I was clipping off the punchlines because my brain was working so fast I wanted to move on to the next thing.'

So why are Irish comics so funny? Don Ward, who founded the Comedy Store, is staging his own St Patrick's Night Special. 'I wanted to open a Dublin Comedy Store about six years ago, but we just couldn't find the right premises.

The Irish are undoubtedly great storytellers. I think they've always been doing it in pubs - now they do it onstage.' There are as many theories as there are performers. Tommy Tiernan, Perrier winner in 1998, thinks that the Irish do well in Edinburgh because there are so few indigenous clubs that gagsmiths have to develop longer sets to earn decent money. This prepares them for an Edinburgh hour much better than the London circuit acts who sometimes have trouble extending their regular 20 minutes.

Ardal O'Hanlon once told me a different theory. 'It's an accident that a bunch of comedians grew up together around the same time with shared interests and developed a certain style which was taken on by others --like the Manchester music scene in the early Nineties. Maybe being away from the corrupting influence of London helped.'

O'Briain, however, thinks that maybe there is something in the Liffey that doesn't just produce the best Guinness in the world, it also nurtures the best comics. 'My dad was a trades union arbitrator and I can remember how good he was at commanding a room. My mother talks very quickly, so maybe the gene pool is there for comedy.' How far this thesis extends is another matter. 'It's easy to slip into the mythology that we are all charming and lovely and then back it up with the bardic tradition of storytelling around the fire, but I'm not sure if that's true. Then again, we are particularly good at a type of talking that doesn't describe things directly. Everything is done by allusion and metaphor, so we have a tendency to twist language, which by a freak of nature is seen as amusing.'

My suggestion is that pre-satellite there was so little television that the Irish had to make their own entertainment, but O'Briain shoots this down. 'A lot of us grew up around Dublin, where we had Irish channels and picked up English channels, so we actually had more television than you.' One of O'Briain's biggest influences was The Bob Monkhouse Show, which featured American comics. He accepts a link between TV and stand-up, but not a causal one. 'Our most popular programme is The Late Late Show which runs for three hours. When we bring on a guest, Jesus, we get the most out of them. So the Irish obviously like chatting.'

Irish comedy has come a long way from the days when the phrase 'Irish joke' was a jibe. Or when one of Dick Emery's primetime characters was called Flynn O'Thick. These days the joke is on us. It's the Irish who are having the last laugh.

Dara O'Briain, Mon 17, Fri 21 & Sat 22 Mar, Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, W1 (020-7478 0100). See Metro Life listings on page 62 for details of the Comedy Store's St Patrick's Night Special.

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