D'Unbelievable Truth

"Kenny and Shortt have a formidable gift for anarchy—a basic ingredient of great comedy. They are our own Commedia dell'Arte, our Laurel and Hardy, our Marx Brothers. In their madness is sanity. As musical and comedy artists, they select notes from the scale of their audience's emotions and combine them into chords that play their listeners like instruments. The result is the laughter we make—music to the ears!"

— Gerald Davis, 1999

He's right, you know. The last time I came face to face with Jon Kenny and Pat Shortt, the comedy duo (or should that be D'Uo?) better known as D'Unbelievables, was in the Traveller's Friend venue in Castlebar in 1994. At the time, they were touring their hit show One Hell Of A Do—a hilarious spoof based around a particularly chaotic rural Irish wedding—and the Mayo venue was sold out, just like everywhere else they played that year. I remember not particularly wanting to do the story at the time ("Mayo? I don't want to go to fucking Mayo!") but returning home much richer for having spent the previous night rolling in the aisles in helpless laughter at one of the most original pieces of theatre I had ever seen. Their appeal lay not just in their thespian skills and superb sense of comic timing, but also in their honest interpretations of the kind of characters we all encounter in our day-to-day existence—the alcoholics in denial, the gossipy spinsters, the overly protective mothers, the drunk uncles, the self-important committee members.

If D'Unbelievables were surfing a wave at that time then it still hasn't crashed. Since our last meeting, Kenny and Shortt have effortlessly maintained their populist pole position in the touring comedy theatre stakes. In fact, not only have they maintained it, but the wave has built into a veritable tsunami over the last half decade. Since 1994, they've toured with another hugely successful show, I Doubt It Says Pauline, performing it everywhere from Dundalk and Dublin to London and New York, and released three of the most successful Irish videos of all time—One Hell Of A Video, D'Video and D'Telly (all of which sold well over the 100,000 mark). More recently they've made a series of incredibly popular television advertisements for the National Lottery, toured with Martin McDonagh's new play for Druid Theatre and appeared in a number of TV sitcoms and feature films.

Their huge success doesn't seem to have affected them in the slightest. The Kenny and Shortt I meet in the dressing room of Vicar St. (on the eve of the press launch of their latest adult pantomime Dat's Life) are as affable, down to earth and professional as they were the last time we shared air. As with most comedians, they're not particularly funny offstage, but perhaps today they have more than their share of reasons for looking so stressed out—they've both just driven from Listowel where they're still in the middle of rehearsals, have a radio ad to record, corporate sponsors to meet and greet and Pat has to drive to Donegal after tonight's launch to shoot the final scenes of a movie. You might say they're d'unbelievably busy at the moment. Still, it's probably all worth it. Presumably the duo have made a hell of a lot of d'ough over the last few years?

"Well, we wouldn't be up to the standard of rock and roll people now," Jon laughs. "The album sales is a big thing with records. Comedy isn't a big market in this country. So while our video got into the charts this year and was the biggest-selling video ever in this country, it's still a bloody small market. It's a market that's been good to us, but you're not going to make a million or anything. The people in the record industry who make money, as you know, make it through royalties and massive sales in America. That's why the likes of The Cranberries and U2 are millionaires. Not through their performances but through the promotion of their records. But we're actually making a very good living and we're very comfortable and we're able to take a month or two off during the year to write a show or to do other things."

"We're happy, you might say," Pat adds in his unreconstructed Tipperary accent, with a contented smile.

And why wouldn't they be? D'Unbelievables are now the most popular comedy duo in the country and are certainly amongst the most well-established in England, a kind of rural Irish alternative to alternative comedians—cute rather than clever, more satirical than sarcastic, funny because their comic creations are familiar to us all.

Although they both laughingly admit that they're still somewhat under-rehearsed and not quite sure at this stage exactly how Dat's Life is going to turn out, the new show will, unsurprisingly, be in a similar vein to their previous efforts.

"We're still in the process of finishing it actually and we're always very reluctant to say exactly what it's about, because we don't want people to say 'oh we thought it was about x, y and z' and in actual fact it's all about something else," Pat explains. "You see what we do is very kind of organic in the way we work and things evolve up to the last minute. In fact, even when the show is up and running it can still change. But once we get a show on the road it tends to more or less stay like that.

"To give you a very bland version of what it's about, it's based on a small rural village in Ireland called Kildicken. Basically you meet the occupants of this village where not much happens. But the one thing they do like that gives them an occasion is a funeral or a birth or a wedding (smiles). And on this occasion I suppose a funeral is the strong theme running throughout—the funeral of a certain individual. And after that it's just general mayhem with all the different characters we've come up with."

And will there be the usual amount of recruiting unsuspecting victims from the audience?

"Yes, there's an element of audience participation in it," he smiles. "That's what we do and that's what we are probably known for. We don't just set out to do it for the sake of it. If the character can work with the audience, we'll certainly look at it, but we don't just say, 'right, we've got to have six audience reaction pieces in the show'. Some of the characters will not go near the audience at all or will not work with the audience. It's not so much that we work the audience, it's more so that the whole show . . .(pauses). Em, there's no fourth wall in our show as in a theatre show you know, where we're on stage and the audience doesn't exist. Our shows tend to work in around the audience. Some of the characters might come down and talk to the audience, but they won't drag them out. They may kind of talk to them as if they're a local person or something like that. But nothing too bad."

Of course, it's fairly unsurprising that their show is set in smalltown Ireland. Although there's a decade between Kenny and the 31-year-old Shortt, both men grew up and still continue to live in rural Ireland. From their first ever appearance together, the couple have always adopted a "take the piss out of what you know" approach to their theatrical endeavours. Despite this, however, they still maintain that their characters have a universal appeal and that the idiosyncrasies of, say, Westmeath or Mayo have their echoes in Dublin, Sydney and New York.

"I think it's the same everywhere and people are the same everywhere," says Jon. "I mean there's parochialism in Dublin as well, you know. Vastly different people who might live beside each other still don't necessarily mix in the same group. Just because you live in an area that's so cosmopolitan and that has a vast amount of different groups, doesn't mean to say you go around meeting everyone else. People can be quite insular in the most cosmopolitan of places. The parochialism exists everywhere. That's where we come from and I think most of the characters that we do exist everywhere. They may speak a different language or have a different accent but that doesn't mean to say that the same gobshite doesn't exist in Dublin 4, you know."

"I think we use rural characters because we are close to that and we still live in the country, but the situations that the characters are in, or the situations they have between them are universal in the sense that they can happen to anybody," adds Pat. "A lot of our characters don't necessarily talk about rural things. They may talk in ruralisms, but not about rural things going on. For instance, in our last show I Doubt It Says Pauline there was this relationship between the mother and the son. And even though it was set in a hall in rural Ireland and there was a local concert going on, the sub-plot was between a mother and son. And the story between them could have happened in any city, anywhere in the world. It just so happened that these characters were from rural Ireland, but the drama between the two of them is universal—all about mothers dominating the son and not letting them out of their sight or whatever."

Familiar or not, however, their comedic country characters still require a certain amount of R&D work and each one is fully work-shopped in rehearsals before being exposed on the stage.

"I mean they're all caricatures to some extent," says Jon, "but there's a realism we're speaking about, and no matter how exaggerated or how caricatured they come across they still have to have some truth in them. You know, where they're coming from is from a real emotion, a real sadness or whatever it is that makes the character work. It has to be real. The person has to have a background. Each character has to have a story, although these things might never even come out during a show. We have to know things like are they married or single, which can be totally irrelevant to the audience. But we have to know that about the character ourselves to make them work."

The duo admit to spending a lot of their time people-watching for research. "We observe people all the time," Pat explains. "There's an awful lot you can learn by looking at people. How that person thinks. And when you're working on a certain character, there's no doubt that when you're in a pub or in a restaurant or somewhere and you are observing, you're looking out for that type of character in a sense, even in a subconscious way. If you go into a filling station and you're doing a character that's whatever, you'll see someone that fits the bill. Always!"

Do you see what you do as art?

"You describe art to me and I'll tell you if we see it that way or not," he laughs. "What is art? I went to art college and that was a big debate among all the students in first year. We still hadn't figured it out when we left! What is art? I don't see it as art. I just see it as what we do, and if you want to put a label on it, by all means go ahead. I won't necessarily say you're right or wrong. Everyone can put their own labels on things."

For his own part, Jon has no problem labelling D'Unbelievables himself, seeing what they do as being completely different from the stand-up work of the likes of Tommy Tiernan or Dylan Moran (both of whom he admires greatly). "I remember somebody describing different types of comedians," he says. "There's what you call a stand-up comedian. There's story-telling stuff and there's character stuff, the comedy actor as such. We'd probably come more into the bracket of the comedy actor. Our show isn't just going to be stand-up and go from one stand-up routine to another. There tends to be a story running through what we do and an array of characters in costume, you know. And like we said, it's a kind of universal comedy."

Even more universal than you might think. Curiously for an Irish act who specialise in rural caricatures, their most understanding critics have been the foreign press. For the most part anyway.

"We've had generally good reviews in Ireland and abroad," says Pat. "Interestingly enough I think the reviewers that put the finger on what we were doing more than anyone else were London reviewers. And we got rave reviews in Minneapolis. It's amazing how different people react. The last time we were in London some guy said Dylan Thomas would turn in his grave because he was comparing I Doubt It Says Pauline with Under Milk Wood. Like, I've never even read it. Another review said we were the closest thing to the last great vaudevillian characters he had ever seen. Reviewers see different things from it depending on what their bias is, because everyone has one, you know."

Do bad reviews bother you?

"Not really," he avers. "What annoys me is someone coming to review a show, who doesn't actually review the show. We've had one person do this before—they didn't end up reviewing the show, they attacked myself and Jon personally. Now, I've no problem with someone attacking me personally. I will answer any question in that respect. But don't come along to review a show and then end up attacking us and not commenting on the material. If you didn't like the show, fair enough. We're not everyone's cup of tea and that goes for U2 to BB King or whatever. Some people like something, some people don't. That's the way life is, the way people are. But to come in and slate Jon and myself personally and not even mention the material—that's not a review, that's a joke. A bad one!"

Although Kenny and Shortt usually spend around ten months a year as D'Unbelievables, they've both done a number of separate film and TV projects recently.

"We've both been involved in a lot of films in the last while," Pat explains. "One film that was recently on the screen was This Is My Father with Aidan Quinn, James Caan and Stephen Rea. I was in that with Brendan Gleeson. I did a film two years previously with Brendan as well. And recently I did a film in Donegal—it's an as yet untitled Irish comedy. It's Ian Hart, myself, Sean McGinley, Sean McDonagh, a Dublin guy, and Niamh Cusack. And it's being produced by Roberta Passolini, who's better known for The Full Monty."

Movie work aside, Shortt was also a big hit with Father Ted fans with his irregular appearances in the show as Tom, the psychotic redneck halfwit in the suspiciously stained "I Shot JR" T-shirt. Unfortunately, Tom wasn't in the third (and unfortunately last) series.

"Yeah, he wasn't in the last one which was a pity," he smiles. "He was a great character and Graham and Arthur loved him. They said they were trying to write him into the last series and he just didn't fit in to any of their stories. They didn't want to shove him in because they thought that would do the character an injustice. But it was a pity because I loved playing him."

Perhaps the pair's highest profile piece of TV work in recent years is their series of advertisements for the Irish Lotto, which have been hugely successful for all concerned.

"Basically those came about through a radio ad we did," says Jon. "We did one radio ad and we came up with some characters—one's a complete fool and one's a half fool. The complete fool was a total idiot altogether. I think the whole idea of the characters when we were given the breakdown originally was that if these two fools can play—the game we were promoting was 5-4-3-2-1 and nobody could understand it originally—anyone can play. It is quite a simple game to play. It's like anything in life, hit people with figures and they get freaked out. So we wrote the sketches for that and then they decided to televise it. They had the big 10-year-old party and they were raising the price and so people would find it very funny and not realise they were being stung for 50p. So they got us in."

Obviously the Lotto ads have made D'Unbelievables amongst the most recognisable comedic actors in the country. Despite this, they're both still quite wary of becoming too familiar to TV audiences and have no intention of making their own show, both infinitely preferring the buzz of live work.

"We tend to stay away from television because doing too much can actually affect your live audience," Jon explains. "If you do Channel 4 or something in England, you've still got a huge audience because there's 40 million people, plus they pay an awful lot more because they have the 40 million audience. In Ireland on RTE, what is it—3 or 4 million people, maybe 2 million people actually watching? So there is no way you'd make a living doing just a TV series. The series would only be on for three months of the year or so and then you'd be unemployed for the rest of the year because you can't get a live gig anywhere—no-one would pay #10 when they can watch you on TV for nothing. That's happened to a lot of entertainers in this country. So we stay well away from television."

Television exposure or not, D'Unbelievables have struck a chord with the Irish public which is likely to see the duo packing 'em in long after this year's models have run out of steam.

And d'at's the truth!

Dat's Life opens at Vicar Street on March 29th.