Andrew Stanley

If we had a male equivalent of the long-gone Housewife of the Year competition (I kid you not, there used to be one!) it is unlikely that Andrew Stanley would win it, or even make the long list. There’s no heart-warming smell of baking bread or sandalwood candles wafting down to greet the visitor at the door of his three-bedrooom semi in a 250-house estate in Swords on the northern edge of Dublin.

Instead, Stanley tells me, “The smell you’re most likely to get is of some Chinese take away left over from the night before, or even the night before that. My housemate Mark does a bit of cooking all right, but not me. He tends to make stir-fry because it’s the easiest dish in the world to make. As for candles, because we’re both single we don’t really have anything girly in the house. So if you come across a few candles they’re obviously left over from the previous tenants.”
And then there’s the carefully manicured garden. Or not, as the case might be. “The garden’s a wreck,” he admits. “Neither of us are what you might call gardeners. We might cut the grass about three times a year, max. We’re a bit student-y about it. In fact we’ve often thought we should just go and put bricks down instead of grass.”
This same work-shy philosophy is not simply confined to the garden, but also carries over to such other household pursuits as DIY. Though, to be fair, he does have a reasonable excuse in that department. “The house is actually owned by Mark’s brother and I don’t think he’d appreciate it if he found we’d been redesigning the living room or whatever,” Andrew says. “So we don’t do any DIY at all. But we have a tap that drips. It doesn’t bother us at all. But every bloke that comes to the house – and this is a very bloke thing, even if he works as a computer programmer– he’ll come in the door, spot the tap immediately, tell us that all it needs is this or that kind of washer. Of course, they don’t actually fix it.”
Art objects include some Lord Of The Rings figurines, a few of Mr Potatohead in different situations, and there’s a futuristic manga-style cartoon by fellow comedian Robbie Bonham on the wall. But the object to which he seems to be most sentimentally attached is his Sony Playstation 3, not an object that often gets one all-teary eyed and nostalgic. “I’m a pragmatic person really,” he claims. “That’s really why I live in Swords. I grew up about half a mile from here and it’s only a 20-minute drive to the city centre. And some genius has come up with the idea of the Swords Express bus that goes through the port tunnel. There’s a decent pub called Wright’s and a new Chinese called Jade Palace in Swords, and the house overlooks a park and we’re close to the start of the countryside too. So it suits me fine. Anyway, I’m out gigging four or five nights and I spend a lot of time in Dublin city.”
It’s a comparatively quiet house too. “It’s not as crazy as it should be,” Andrew says. “I don’t really have other comedians calling around unless we’re working on a project. I have a computer desk where I work. I don’t try out new material doing air comedy in front of a mirror, and I don’t write much of the material down. I’ve tried that, but it didn’t look very funny on paper.”
Andrew admits to watching a lot of comedy on TV. “I watch the Paramount channel a lot, and programmes like Friends or Scrubs and I recently started watching Q1, a sort of comedy quiz show. But I don’t listen to the radio much. I like Phantom, but my car aerial is broken so I tend to use the mp3 player a lot.”
And what might be on the Stanley mp3? “I change it about every fortnight. At the moment I have Foals, Fionn Regan, Bell X1, Damien Rice and a lot of acoustic Irish acts. The best move I ever made was getting this player as it only holds about 18 albums’ worth. I used to have a 20-gig one but I realised I hadn’t listened to most of the tracks for over a year. Sometimes I buy albums and forget I have them already. Like last week I bought Pinkerton by Weezer for about the fifth time. Probably the earliest album I have would be Pablo Honey by Radiohead or Bleach by Nirvana.”
But it’s not all good. Stanley admits to having a weakness for boybands such as N’Sync. But we let him off with a caution. He reads a lot too. “It’s mostly fantasy fiction, like Raymond E Feist and David Gemmell. I have the whole Robert Jordan Wheel Of Time collection. I probably have every John Grisham book too, and I’ve just started How To Be Good by Nick Hornby. It was sitting on my bookshelf for ages and I’d never read it. If I’m flying anywhere I usually buy maybe three books for the trip. Those I’d just pick from whatever appealed to me on the shelves, but sometimes I want a particular book, like I’m currently waiting on the new Robert Jordan, and I go and get it.”
And of course there’s a few comedy books to hand as well. “There’s Gift Of The Gag by Stephen Dixon. It came out about ten year ago. It’s kind of the Irish comedy Bible, and I’ve a book about showbiz in America and how totally different it is compared to here, with gigs in bowling alleys and stuff like that.”