Floored genius?

Pity the lot of the stand-up performer, forced to conjure witty, incisive and topical gags on a weekly basis. When I call Dara O’Briain in London, he and his co-writers on BBC2’s Saturday night humour-fest The Live Floor Show are struggling to piece together material for a run-through of the program scheduled for later that night. “We’ve just come up with an absolutely brilliant joke,” groans Dara, “and realised that Bill Bailey’s already done it!”

Subconscious plagiarism would appear to be just one of the many hazards of meeting a weekly deadline.

“We come in on Wednesday and trawl through the papers trying to come up with stuff for the show at the weekend,” Dara explains. “We run it past an audience that night, who come into the gig for free, none of whom have usually read the newspapers. The whole process is often not particularly helpful, because when you’re writing a show like this, you read every single daily, and you’re usually talking about stories which haven’t yet fully seeped into the public consciousness.”

Given the difficulties involved in making a program of the nature of The Live Floor Show, Dara is eagerly looking forward to the string of live dates he has lined up for Ireland next month. At his acclaimed show in Edinburgh a couple of years back, he amusingly held forth on the pros and cons of turning 30. Will there be a similar motif linking the material on the current tour?

“Oh, I think all the best stand-up shows tie stuff together into a theme,” Dara replies. “The show that I’ll be doing on the Irish tour will veer into different areas, but there will be some broad theme, which, roughly speaking, will be built around my grandmother’s death. She passed away last year at the age of 100 - she actually fought in the war of independence. I talk about the weirdness of knowing this woman as my grandmother, and yet her being a hero, and never having really spoken to her about it.”

O’Briain’s traditionalist, observational style is undoubtedly in marked contrast to the post-modernist antics favoured by some of the more hyped acts on the stand-up circuit. Whilst critical darlings such as Noble & Silver have demonstrated an ingenious gift for deconstructing their chosen medium, they frequently cross the line where experimental comedy spills over into avant-garde theorising. Clever, but not exactly laugh-a-minute material.

“I went to see Noble & Silver’s second show at Edinburgh,” Dara remembers. “It was the year after they broke really big. I sat at the back, hating them for wasting an audience, because basically the whole joke was on the crowd. Lovely lads, by the way, but they were selling 150 tickets every night to people who walked out scratching their heads. It’s probably just not a live thing – it’s clever, but not especially funny. I do, for whatever reason, feel the need to pepper my performances with a lot of jokes!”

Although he remains sceptical of the so-called “progressive” elements within the comedy scene, Dara warmly enthuses about his fellow Irish comics. After offering the obligatory nods to Dylan Moran (“the way he twists the language is incredible”) and Tommy Tiernan (“great at creating stuff with emotional resonance”), he singles out Ed Byrne for special praise.

“Ed can wring laughter out of a subject like no one else, and the way he paces the material is always a joy to watch. Similar to music, comedy is all about tension and release, and there are a number of ways of doing it. But if you look at the way Ed crafts his stuff, it’s very lean, there’s very little fat on there. It’s actually been quite educational to me, observing the way he gets his material to be that funny so consistently.”

Dara first came to the attention of a wider audience via his appearances on the chaotic RTE panel show Don’t Feed The Gondolas. Though operating with the usual handicaps of the state broadcaster’s comedy output – minuscule budgets, no resident writers, resource-draining 20-week commissions – the show nonetheless produced its fair share of anarchic comic fun.

“I think there was actually a slightly snooty attitude towards it in the press,” O’Briain reflects, “mainly because it didn’t compare well to the equivalent shows in England. That’s probably a little harsh, given that we were trying to get by with a fraction of the money those shows receive. But, yeah, there were some wonderfully bizarre moments, like Ronnie Drew getting into a bit of strop – he hated it!

“There was also the time BP Fallon held up a wad of dope on the show. We had the standard 60-second quiz at the end, and one of the questions was, ‘According to a recent survey, marijuana is what?’ BP duly produced a baggie and said, ‘This!’ I suppose Gondolas seemed to strike a chord with a particular age-group at the time, which was good. Although, on the down side, I do still get the blame for ‘Jesus In The House’!”