“Hey there, Olaf! Presumably you’re here to totally wreck the career of another Irish comedian?”

Dara O Briain obviously has some slight reservations about being interviewed by Hot Press. When I meet him in the lounge of Dublin’s Merrion Hotel, he immediately makes reference to the recent debacle over this writer’s public interview with Tommy Tiernan at the Electric Picnic (of which much more later). Hopefully he’s not being serious – after all, that’s what he does for a seriously successful living.
Born in Wicklow in 1972, O Briain – a gaelgoir who holds a degree in theoretical physics from UCD – first came to public attention on these shores back in the mid-90s as a presenter on RTE children’s show Echo Island. By 1998 his international stand-up career had begun to take off and he soon graduated to presenting the slightly more adult Don’t Feed The Gondolas, as well as regularly appearing on various other RTE shows.
His ascent to stardom rapidly accelerated following the inevitable move to London in 2002. Although he regularly returned home to ringmaster The Panel, impressively quick-witted performances on shows such as Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Have I Got News For You (which he guest-hosted on a few occasions) proved rocket fuel for his profile. The genial Irishman is now an almost ubiquitous face on UK television, most notably hosting the satirical BBC comedy panel game Mock The Week, and is widely regarded as the natural successor to Sir Terry Wogan.
He’s in town for a Late Late appearance to promote his first book, Tickling The English. Part tour diary, part travelogue, part historical/sociological treatise, it documents O Briain’s 2008 stand-up tour of England in typically irreverent and self-deprecating style. Detailing the monotony, madness and anti-socialising of life on the road, it should be required reading for anyone who aspires to becoming a touring comic.
He seems in top form today. When photographer Mark Nixon takes a shot of us standing together, the solidly built 6’4” comedian towers over me. Not wanting to be dwarfed, I jokingly ask him to crouch down a little, and he obligingly goes down on his haunches. Afterwards, he inscribes the book, “You’ll always be the bigger man to me!”

Olaf Tyaransen: How did you go about writing the book?
Dara O Briain: Well, I was gathering stuff as I went, as in all the audience bits and all the various observations and photos – they were all scribbled down last year. And then in January, because I tour every second year... what are we now? 2009. We’re an odd year. So, on the odd-numbered years there’s a block period where I can do other stuff. And, you know, I sat down in January or February and just thought, ‘Right, how the fuck am I’m going to order this?’ Stuff written on sheets, put up on walls, and then it was three months of actually writing. In fact, I left the more discursive chapters, and the conclusions and the opening and everything until I put the actual journey down. Mid-way through the book I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it at all, because I kind of, I don’t agree with national identity on one level.
Well, ultimately your book celebrates people’s inherent individuality rather than any national identity.
You’re absolutely right, yeah. I mean, there is no average Englishman, same as there is no average Irishman. Although we may come slightly closer because it’s a less homogenous country over there. They are very disparate. And the rural/urban divide we have here is nothing to the North/South thing there. But it is about, yeah, ultimately there is more craic in the Solero guy [an audience member claimed to have invented the ice cream – OT] than a funeral director.
And that’s what your comedy is based on.
It is of course. You are looking for that story that everybody has that makes them remarkable.
How much of your show is scripted?
It would be 75/25 in terms of percentages. I would hopefully have 90 minutes of material and that would be then supplemented by 30 minutes of stuff coming from the audience. And if something takes off and if an idea becomes a runner what I have to do is selectively drop things in order to give scope to that.
Do you have support acts on the tour?
No, well, I try to do the whole show myself, and I wouldn’t just book a support act. I wouldn’t spend 400 quid a night for a pal. You know, because then I might as well just ring an escort agency every town I go into and have benefit from my friend! [laughs] But no, I don’t want to give up the time onstage because I set up gags in the first half that I recoup in the second half, that kind of stuff. You’d have to offer half an hour to another comic to come in and then you’d go on after that, and I don’t particularly want to do that. But I’m okay. I mean, I get on very well with the guy I travel with. There were two tours where I didn’t travel with anyone, and that was genuinely a bit, you know...
What, you just drove around by yourself?
I wasn’t even driving, it was in trains. So it wasn’t as if you could just drive home. I would have to stay over in a small hotel. I was playing 200-seaters, so they weren’t great hotels! And I would sit there and watch – genuinely watch – the African Nations football tournament live from Kinshasa, drinking cans of cider, and it wasn’t a great lifestyle. I’d buy some chips on the way home. Because the punters all fuck off. Immediately you finish the show, they’re all gone. A line I have in one of the shows is that the reward for being really good in the social comedy circuit, when you’re doing the 20 minute sets, is an incredibly unsocial life where you don’t see anyone for ages. It’s a bit weird, but the flip-side of which is you’re also doing festivals, where you and 200 of your friends take over a city for a month.
Back in your bachelor days did you find being a stand-up comic was a good way to meet women?
Eh, it’s an introduction. I mean, I think it was Frankie [Boyle] during the week described us as ‘bottom-feeders’. Essentially the idea was that we would get the plankton of women, but that wasn’t me – he was aiming too low! You do club nights where you basically flirt with the audience for twenty minutes, which is what stand-up is a lot of the time – flirt with the audience for twenty minutes, and then the nightclub starts. And you are past the ‘hello’, so that’s handy enough, but I think after that then you are down to your natural ability, and I’m not sure if comedians are genuinely that good. We had ones who were complete hounds, there are guys who really milked it, and whose numbers, I’m sure, in that great chalkboard in the sky are very, very good. But to answer your question, it gives you a head-start, I suppose, and then it’s up to you.
There’s a great story in the book about Emo Philips telling you that you curse too much onstage.
Let’s face it, I do. And I wanted to get a T-shirt printed up with: ‘Bad language – it props up bad writing’. Because that’s meant to be a put-down, but it genuinely does offer more punch to something if you say ‘fuck’ at the right moment. And I do, a lot, particularly in live stuff. And I even have lines, I even tell jokes that excuse the fact that I say ‘fuck’, which is a sign of complete craziness, and I excuse it on the grounds of national identity and all sorts of stuff like, ‘Oh, we’re Irish. This is how we talk.’
Some of your jokes – like the one about the Crappos in Jersey – only work at specific times or in specific locations.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that joke! And I love gags that you can only use once at very specific times. And Crappo is one. I mean, shouting, ‘Hello... cunts!’ And they all got a big laugh out of it. But – nothing to do with bad language – there's a whole routine I have that I once did at the Refrigeration and Cooling Awards 2007, which was a top-quality set of jokes about latent heat of molecules and how, you know, basically the entire cooling industry is based on the absorption of heat into a nuclear bomb. Went down really, really well, and I can never do it again.
You were obviously drawing on your theoretical physics background for that one.
Well, it was more the fact that it was a very nerdy joke for fridge salesmen. And I remember going, ‘That’s a joke I can never do again,’ and that got just as big a round of applause.
When did you realise that comedy was going to be a proper career?
When I had been doing it about seven years. I started doing comedy straight after college. You don’t get that many gigs so I started doing kids TV as well. In fact, I did anything I could get. All you can get as a 23-year-old is kids’ TV. So I ended up doing Echo Island, which is sort of irritatingly reported as, ‘He started as a children’s television presenter’, which then, more irritatingly became, ‘He started as a children’s entertainer’, which is a whole other degree of lie involving me in long shoes and a red nose making balloon animals, and thinking, ‘someday... someday...’ And also I was writing a column for the Sunday World. The point of which was, I did all these things for three years to see how the comedy would work out. And I loved it, I adored it. After three years I was able to go, ‘Alright, I am just going to focus on this’.
You co-founded the student newspaper in UCD, didn’t you?
Yeah. We went to their 15 year anniversary. Myself and a fella called Pat Leahy. He’s the political editor for The Sunday Business Post. We started this paper and we went to its 15 year anniversary, which is sort of weird to walk around... you know, I’m trying to find a non-fucking-saccharine way to describe it. Basically, we went out and we ended up in a nightclub dancing with a bunch of 22-year-olds, which, you know, had long been a dream, and becomes a more distant one as time goes by. But yeah, we set up a newspaper. And at the moment I’m writing a column for The Guardian every week. So I’m still doing bits of it. And it’s a pain in the fuckin’ hole – I stayed up until 3 in the morning last night trying to come up with an opinion about [email protected]. Have you heard about this? [goes into lengthy explanation]. But I managed to stir it up.
Columns are one thing, but did you find the writing of a full-length book difficult?
Part of it, actually, yeah. It’s a different discipline to writing stand-up. Writing stand-up, you actually talk it out over and over again. You just get the key phrases and you write them out, and it becomes like a muscle memory. You learn to say it over and over again, and you learn that from here I go to there, and I can put that into there. You end up with a load of different little jokes and you then work out how the fuck they work. The weirdest experience I’ve had writing a stand-up show was – it was either the last tour or the tour before – I had enough stuff but had no idea what order to put it in. And I wrote all the routines out on bits of paper and threw them in the air, literally to see in what order they would land. But in terms of this book, it’s a very readable book, which is my own euphemism for: there are no literary pretensions. I’m describing the things that happened in the order they occurred. But the writing is as much about the timing as anything else, rather than me trying to show off my vocabulary.
Well, they say that easy reading is hard writing.
The craft is there. I have a very clear and concise style. And you have to do that with a lightness of touch. And the construction of it I am very happy with, but the parallel I drew was if I had written The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly. His book opens with some beautiful phrase about, ‘Untrammelled, my spirit floats across mountain tops…’ Some beautiful imagery. Mine would have started with the words, ‘I have only one good eye’. I only have one good eye. That’s how prosaic I would have been about it.
You admit in the book that you drink a lot of wine while you’re writing stand-up material.
The first two get you going, the middle two are when you’re good, the last two fuck you up.
Glasses or bottles?
I’m realistic, I measure it out, like. Obviously I could do four if I had tankards. But there is something about writing as a reaction. Like, I react to an audience at every gig, but creating that in a room on my own is very difficult. But the wine at least tilts you off your axis slightly. Now, this isn’t how I do it all the time. I don’t, every time I need to write a joke, open another fuckin’ bottle of wine and get hammered. It’s just I do remember this being an effective way. I wrote a very good balloon safari routine once in exactly that state.
A what?
A routine about balloon safaris, which was the crescendo of my best ever show, it was a ten-minute rant about balloon safaris. But that I specifically remember in a house-share off the Halloway Road in North London – me sitting in the house on my own. Me and my fucking flatmates, we never really bonded. And I would just drink and get slaughtered and then sit in this dull apartment just roaring at myself and then reacting to myself. It’s a weird thing but… you know, and some day that adds up in terms of calories and liver damage so you’ve got to fuckin’ find a way of not doing it like that.
Would you ever use anything else to get just slightly out of yourself?
Not particularly useful. No, I wouldn’t have thought the… What, like go get stoned and do it?
Yeah.
You’d just fall asleep, like [laughs].
You’ve always seemed a very sensible type. Did you ever go down that…
What, that self-destructive route?
Yeah.
Not really, no.
You write that, although you were studying theoretical physics and maths in university, you actually avoided all of your nerdy fellow students outside of lectures.
Yeah, but I ran to where I thought there were more attractive women, because I felt self-conscious about my nerdiness. Which was a stupid thing to do, and was a waste of time, really. I rediscovered my nerd in the last few years. So my rock ‘n’ roll years were great fun, but ultimately very shallow.
Okay, I want to talk a little bit about the Tommy Tiernan thing. What’s your take on what happened?
My take on the Tommy thing? Em... the point he makes is valid, which is that things shouldn’t be taken out of context. There’s a line in the show last year called, ‘You had to be there’, which is one of the beauties of live comedy. You know, events occur which are impossible to explain because you weren’t there and you would not know the situation. Not every joke is written to be typed out like a Christmas cracker joke, and a lot of them are based in that moment and is a reaction to the energy and the tensions in the room.
It’s really about release of tension, isn’t it?
All comedy is a release of tension. All laughter, excuse me, is a release of tension. Comedy is contriving that release of tension. The vast majority of what people laugh – it's not jokes. It’s nervous laughter, it’s a social reaction. The laugh. The crowd. The pause. People laugh but it is just tension. And some of the richest experiences you can have watching live comedy cannot be repeated back because you are stripping them of all the power and all the context. I do it in a much more benign way, so I’ll talk to audience members and we’ll have a moment, we’ll share a look, or a thing, and the audience have a laugh, and it’s a glorious thing. And it’s impossible to recreate. So there is a whole school of jokes that exists in that moment. And Tommy set the moment up where he had specifically said, there are unsayable things that you can say, and then there’s a gap, and that’s the point in which you have to say the unsayable thing. Now, it’s a fair point to make and there is an element of a bitter irony in the fact that in making a point about, ‘There are jokes which should not be repeated,’ Tommy then got castigated because the joke was repeated again. Yeah, the whole point was, this was something that in the cold light of day would look horrendous. But when you’re on stage you can say this to the audience and they’ll react in a way that they wouldn’t if they saw it in print. That entire thing being put into print – it takes a certain leadenness of thought to take it as literally as that. I have a strong belief that we have a tendency in this country, as they do in England, to be smug about Americans not getting irony. It’s a phrase I’ve heard a million times: ‘Oh, Americans they don’t understand sarcasm, they don’t get humour.’ And then something like this happens – or the Ken Bigley joke with Billy Connolly a couple of years ago – and we take the most cold, literal view of it, and say this is the only way that this can possibly be delivered. These are all fair points I think, and ones that are important to make.
It seems that people are actively looking to be offended by comedians nowadays.
People are waiting to take offence because offence sells newspapers at the moment. So, we been getting offended by Jimmy Carr making a perfectly reasonable, kind of affectionate joke about amputees. And he works with amputees. Frankie Boyle constantly getting hassle over things he says. Em… The Sachsgate, or as Frank Skinner called it, ‘Sachs-a-phone’, which is a far superior name for it. These are all fair points to make. Tommy did make the point with a hammer, though. That’s the only thing. He chose one of the great untouchables as a topic, and that was unfortunate, and poorly judged. There are just certain things. That and, god love her, Madeline McCann are the two things that people are most sensitive about.
Have you ever found yourself in trouble over a gag?
I once had a woman write to me and say, ‘You use autism as a very casual term'. And I do. I use it the way that it is popularly used, in terms of it just being people who make lists and get upset about minor details of things. And she said, ‘It’s actually really offensive to those whose children actually have autism'. It’s a really awkward situation to be in, because it does have a cultural meaning that is not the same – it’s like schizophrenia and depression, it’s one of these things that have another meaning, but I can’t say that doesn’t get under my skin and make me less likely to use it. But anyway, you were asking for my take on the thing with Tommy. Tommy has the soul of a cult comedian trapped in the body of an enormously popular mainstream comedian. Tommy’s heart is Lenny Bruce, but his delivery and timing and empathy with the Irish people is amazing, more like … [pauses] I was going to say Brendan Grace or something but that’s actually …well, that wouldn’t necessarily detract from either of the two men. If he was just quietly doing this like Stewart Lee...
I actually saw Stewart Lee perform a fortnight ago at the Galway Comedy Festival.
Oh yeah? A brilliant comic. And that entire routine in which he’s trying to vomit into Jesus’ anus is an incredibly disquieting routine to watch, and the DVD, whoever edited it, doesn’t shy away from showing audience members who are just going, ‘Do you know, this is too much. I can’t take it'.
Are you pally with comedians, generally?
Yeah, yeah. We have a thing. I mean, there is a myth that we’re all sitting around depressed, like, or whatever. Comedians are great company. Plus, we all work the same hours, so we got along very well. But yeah, there would be – even in Twitter we find ourselves – the corner that I’m in, in Twitter, is me, Charlie Brooker, Graham Linehan, Chris Addison. We get on well.
Do you embrace all that social networking stuff?
Yeah, I’m okay with that. More so, the Facebook and things like that. Tweeting is just people firing gags at each other.
Frankie Boyle recently left Mock The Week. What’s the story there?
I think he was just exhausted from doing it, because Frankie did it at a very intense pitch. He had been doing it very intensely for about seven series now. And Frankie went in there tooled up, as you can tell from the record, and the broadcast. Even watching the record. He has a million things he wants to say when he does Mock The Week. And it’s very intense. His family is up in Glasgow, he could only do the show when was in London, and he hadn’t seen his little one for a little while, so it all added up to just him being ready to do something else instead. I don’t think he is a natural showbusiness person, Frankie. That’s one of his charms. He’s a lovely fella, and he’s quiet and, you know, he will surprise you by getting in contact with you, or you’ll see him and he’ll have remembered your child’s birthday. That kind of stuff, like. He’s a decent guy. But he has a whole other life outside [of comedy] that he wants to focus on, and I think he has found it. You know, he has done well enough. Now, unfortunately for him, he then had a stress-related chest pain on the last show, which meant that he didn’t do the last show. He’s fine now, but people will associate that, and also I’ve seen someone Tweet, ‘Oh, he got fired because of the Rebecca Adlington jokes’. So, the tweeting will percolate into truth.
What was the joke?
Rebecca Adlington. In the middle of a thing, he got condemned by the BBC Trust – a poor joke he did about Rebecca Adlington. She’s a British swimmer who won two gold medals at the last Olympics and came back and Frankie made a joke about how she had a big nose, basically. And it was much better done than that, to be honest [Boyle actually said “she’s like someone who’s looking at themselves in the back of a spoon” – OT]. But it was still, you could kind of say, ‘Jesus, she’s hardly off the plane, like'. But he's currently he is no. 8 in the Amazon Charts and I was no. 12 at the time or something like that, after [appearing on] Jonathan Ross. And he sent me a text going, ‘I see from the Amazon charts that a good appearance on Jonathan Ross isn’t as useful as abusing a national heroine’. He’s a smart guy. We’ll miss him.
Are you a very career orientated person?
Jesus! [outraged] It’s only journalists from rock magazines that would ask a question as bizarre as, ‘are you careerist’?
I don’t see it as a bizarre question. If you were offered, say, ten million quid for a sell-out gig in Vegas would you retire?
I wouldn’t retire, no. I’d do the fuckin’ sell-out gig in Vegas. Nothing wrong with that. I like performing, I like writing new shows. I’d carry on doing that. I can only do that until... maybe if I decided that being away from my family was too much of a chore. But weirdly, I have a massive problem, you do get young journalists…
I’m a year older than you, Dara!
Be that as it may [laughs]… levelling this as a criticism. I am a thirty-seven year old man with a family. I work for a living. Why should I not do more work for a living? The really weird thing, you wouldn’t go to somebody…
Well, the question is more about art versus commerce, and if it came down to the compromise...
It's a Bill Hicks question.
Okay, Dara, do you ever feel like you’re sucking Satan’s cock?
Fuck, no! I’ve done one ad once in my life for pubs in Dublin. And I’m more than happy to advocate pubs. I think I’m very pro-pubs. I get offered lots of things and I turn down, obviously, the vast majority of them – and then we got offered one thing for a particular drinks company, which we haven’t said yes to, but I did kind of go, ‘Oh well, you know, people will go…’ And then I go, ‘Wait, I have been drinking that specific drink for twenty years now,’ and you are kind of going, ‘Fuck, actually yeah, why shouldn’t I?’ Because they are a company with people with working families. I have not done this, by the way.
In fairness, Dara, that wasn’t necessarily...
This is an argument. I am quite happy to have this just as an argument. I have not actually been paid by anyone to advertise. People take a very simplistic view of commerce, as if, well, if you work in the performing arts then how dare you be in any way involved? That’s fuckin’ harsh on the poor punters who fuckin’ push barrels around in a distillery somewhere and want to fuckin’ get their product out there as well, god love them. There is a very… I find this quite hard to articulate… It’s how irritating I find the notion that if you get any work at all, or if you do well, that you’ve somehow fuckin’ sold out. That crops up a lot, particularly…
By young rock journalists!
Young rock journalists are in thrall to him, and into all Hicks’ apparent integrity, and how he, “the dead man,” would never have done the stuff that they themselves aren’t necessarily doing, but it’s good to have somebody fanning that flame. And at some point you go, ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake lads, grow up will ya!’ It’s a kind of, it’s a teenager’s attitude towards the world. You know, this kind of purist/black and white stuff, or whatever. I like gigging, I like standing in front of audiences and making people laugh, it’s a pure instinct thing for me more than anything else. I don’t even mind doing the fuckin’ national refrigeration convention stuff. I had a fuckin’ great gig there one year. Not that cool but I had five great nerdy jokes about fridges, right. But, clearly they weren’t that good because they didn’t get me back the following year! And I messed around with some guy in the front of the audience – Fred, let’s call him. But these were all people in tuxedos. Exactly the kind of gig where the rock journalist would think, ‘How dare you even do that!’
That wasn’t what I was saying…
No, no, no, no! But it comes up a lot. And this guy, Fred, right. And at the very end I said, ‘Thank you, of course, for a beautiful evening… FRED!’ And there was big round of applause. And I was walking out and saying goodbye, shaking hands, and this woman goes, ‘Thank you so much for doing this’. And I said, ‘Okay.’ And she says, ‘When we found out that Fred had cancer, the entire industry was shocked. He is one of the founding fathers…’ And you’re going, ‘I didn’t fucking know he had cancer!’ And that could have gone either way, I could have made any kind of gag at that gig. But, they’re just punters in a room, ultimately, no matter what they’re doing. The best gigs are the live tour gigs. But anywhere you are standing in front of punters and making punters laugh, is fine by me.
What’s your take on what’s happened to Ireland economically in the last 18 months?
I’m intrigued by the fact that in the book charts it’s all… you know, I was going to rename the book: Tickling the English: How Fianna Fáil Broke Ireland, because that seems to be how you fuckin’… You know, 1,200 people paid in to watch the four writers of books detailing how screwed the country is… the four angry men or something like that. I’ll be back in January and get a better taste of it then in terms of how …the most telling experience I had was when we did the Three Men In A Boat trip around Ireland about two weeks ago. BBC crew – everyone was all smiling and laughing, life is good – and then the BBC crew go, ‘Cut!’ And they turn away and I turn to the people in Mullingar or Athlone, or Shannon, or wherever the hell we were, and I go, ‘So how are things?’ And they go, ‘Ah, it’s gone to shite!’ And then the crew go, ‘Okay we’re filming again.’ All happy faces, all smiling, and we’re on the sell again. You can tell that it’s not the place it was, and you can see empty houses and all that kind of stuff.
Empty estates.
Oh yeah, and tower blocks in Inchicore with nothing in them. And empty retail at the bottom and empty offices above that, and then empty houses behind them. And you worry is it going to be a nation of albatrosses. But god knows.
What are your plans for 2010?
I go back on the road. I go back with a brand new show. A new hideously careerist show that’s being brought to you by Monsanto. They’re sponsoring the show. Along with Microsoft – I’ll be hosting Windows 7 launch parties at each of the gigs [laughs].