Don't Kill the Funnyman

There is one basic rule you should follow when conducting an interview – don’t kill your subject. At least not until you’ve got a few decent quotes out of them first.

Five minutes after saying hello to me, Dara O’Briain has a near death experience when he nearly chokes on a mouthful of rice. It wasn’t my fault – it was more of an occupational hazard. O’Brian’s a busy man, and today he’s been on a non-stop media merry-go-round – newspapers, television, and most important of all Hot Press. He hasn’t had ten minutes to himself so he’s having lunch as we talk. That’s when a grain of rice attempts to hasten the comic’s demise – like David slewing Goliath.
“How great would that be if you had to perform the Heimlich on me midway through the interview,” he says once he regains his breath.
I doubt the Heimlich would help. O’Briain is what’s called a fine figure of a man – six foot four and broad, built like a brick shithouse. In comparison I’m a midget. I probably couldn’t get my arms all the way around him. He casts a critical eye at me when I point this out.
“Oh God, I’d be fucked.”
We’re sitting in the penthouse suite of one of Dublin’s better hotels. If no time to eat is the downside of success, this is surely one of the perks, but O’Briain seems little uncomfortable in his luxurious surroundings. It’s a striking space, all dark colours and polished granite as if the designers were mainlining testosterone.
“I’m ruining the look of the place by eating chicken, badly. There’s nothing domineering or masculine about the way I’m stuffing food into my mouth,” says O’Briain.
“We’ve been doing all the interviews up here with me apologising for this huge, ridiculously imposing table. It’s like, ‘Look at the size of my table – it’s fourteen foot long.’ It’s like something Blofeld would use, if Blofeld gave interviews discussing his plans for world domination.”
While O’Briain himself may have some way to go before achieving world domination, his profile rise has continued to rise over the last few years, both in Ireland and in the UK. These days O’Briain can pack a house of enthusiastic fans without any trouble at all. For his 2008 stand-up tour he completed over a hundred dates, thirty-four in Dublin alone. With that many gigs, he says, audience participation is crucial, to keep the show fresh.
“When you do long tours with a show, the nights can become samey and by not including the audience you’re wasting a resource that could make a gig unique. I have a mathematical formula for it – as a professional trained comedian I should have, let’s say, ten times better stories than the average punter. But if I’m in a room with a thousand punters, they as an audience have a hundred times better stories than I do. That’s the way the numbers work out, therefore every so often I should open the floor up to them, because they will inevitably deliver something.”
O’Briain’s ability to spin gold out of audience remakes is particularly impressive and gives his shows a kind of spontaneity, almost as if the entire set was delivered off the cuff.
It looks effortless and unlike many comedians who practise the art of seeming spontaneous, O’Briain denies preparing his ad-libs.
“No, no, no! You’ve got to keep that fresh. There are comedians who ask ‘Where are you from?’ and they have a line for every town, but that just gets depressing. But you do get better at it; you get better at trusting your own instincts. The initial idea has to come from some sort of instinct. Your brain goes, ‘Right, what do we know about this?’ and fires everything at you, every association your brain can make, until you build a little drama out of it, until something gains traction.”
O’Briain’s standard modus operandi is to ask people about their jobs.
“The greatest problem is that if you go someone and they have a really technical job that the audience doesn’t understand or that I don’t understand – like a database informatics manager or process remuneration for the derivatives industry. A lorry driver, that’s gold; a farmer, gold; an astronaut – God, I’d kill for an astronaut.”
“The other night we had a dentist on, and I asked what the swirling pink liquid was for – why is it not clear, why does it have to be pink? And he said that it’s to mask the blood when you spit. I thought this was a great phrase. I can’t think of any routine that would ever end with that as a punch line – ‘It masks the blood when you spit’ so that became a motif throughout the show. It’s random, why one thing would stick and the other thing doesn’t, I don’t know. But you can’t be going in your head, ‘Oh, I had a dentist last week. What did I say to them?’ and try to recreate that moment.”
This does mean that some of O’Briain’s funniest jokes are one-offs. Luckily though, some gems have made it onto his latest DVD, such as the pair of London cobblers who double as a crime-fighting duo. Yes, I realise how that sounds – hence the provisional name for the 2008 tour: ‘You Had To Be There.’
We might watch a lot of the same television shows and attend the same comedy gigs, but O’Briain believes that in some ways the Irish sense of humour is fundamentally different to the English one. The 2008 show includes a joke about feral priests – you had to be there – which he notes, doesn’t work with Irish audiences.
“It always gets a weird response here, a bit like, ‘Ah, don’t be saying that!’”
O’Briain is more interested in making us laugh than shocking Irish sensibilities.
“Irish audiences don’t respond to shock tactics in comedy. There are a lot of young comics in the UK who think that the way to do it is to be like a bad version of Frankie Boyle – jokes about rape, jokes about the McCanns – and Irish audiences don’t find that funny.”
O’Briain notes that his dislike of such material means he’s never going to be seen as comedy’s cutting edge bad boy, but he’s unconcerned.
“Often in interviews people would question me about my lack of edge, but how much of an achievement is it to make a joke about the McCanns? How taboo busting is it?”
Ultimately aren’t those jokes risk-averse? They’re conservative since you’d be guaranteed a response.
“Yes, exactly! It airs on the side of predictability. It’s a bit like people doing ‘Bush is stupid’ jokes. Enough!”
If you are one of the few people who didn’t make it to Vicar street, then the 2008 show is out on DVD 17 November – “Q4, as it’s called in business” for the Christmas market.
“It makes a wonderful gift. It’s heart warming, it’s cheering, it’s seasonal. What family wouldn’t love to sit around and watch it? Fuck it, I can’t sell myself. It makes me feel like such a whore.”