Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

What comedy show about to tour Ireland gives you the benefit of three performers who between them have 1500 years of comedy experience? According to Anne Gildea it’s “Funny Girls”. The alleged experience is split evenly between Anne, her fellow ex-Nuala Sue Collins and the third musketress, Pom Boyd. “That’s 500 years each. And that’s just stage time!” Anne claims boldly.

Funny Girls are busy girls and I have to track each one down separately for interview. Anne speaks to me with twittering birds and the sound of her own typing digits in the background from the artist’s retreat at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig. Background music for Pom and Sue is provided by their own respective offspring’s vocal indignation at the Ma’s giving away precious moments of attention to yer man from Hoot Press.
“You can say my book is my child,” offers Anne, who is hard at work on her second novel. “I wrote one and it nearly got published. Then I wrote something in a lighter vein and now I have serious interest from an Irish publisher.” Negotiations are taking place and there is talk of a three-book deal. In addition to this Anne is about to star with Karl Spain in a film Maybe If You..., directed by Michael McCudden for the Short Shorts series. “I’m the glamourous lump in the bed while Spain prances around trying to turn me on,” she explains.” I get to see Karl’s bottom.” We agree this is something to look forward to on the big screen.
Strong writing ability is a shared characteristic of the three members of the Funny Girls team. While Anne works on her novel, Sue Collins is a regular columnist in The Village and Pom Boyd is finishing up the final draft of a film script for Saffron Films. Pom will then head straight into writing a play commissioned by The Abbey.
With this high level of literary activity, it is only these three from the earliest Funny Girls shows who can make themselves available to do regular gigs. If you want something done, don’t bother asking a busy man: ask a frenetically busy woman.
Anne explains the genesis of Funny Girls: “The first shows came about in 2003 when I called D.C.U. [Anne’s Alma Mater – as well as that of stand up brother Kevin Gildea and his sometime comedy colleagues Ardal O’Hanlon, Barry Murphy and yours truly] and asked if they would be interested in an evening of Comedy Ladies. We’d just done a girls-only show at he Comedy Cellar and we just got everyone who’d played at that to come and do the DCU gig.”
After the success of this DCU event and a subsequent repeat performance it was clear that this was a show that had an audience, but equally clear that some of the nine original protagonists would simply not be able to commit on an ongoing basis. Funny Girls shows took place in various venues on an ad hoc basis, but in March of this year it came to a point where only our three heroines were available for a show in Monaghan. And it worked a treat, with Anne compering and mixing in her more conventional stand up schtick with the character-based work of Pom and Sue.
Pom Boyd’s comedy characters are (or should be) legendary among those of us who have been around comedy in Ireland for a while. Her “Windy Lady”, a gently surreal older country lady who may or may not be talking to someone else as well as herself at a Donnybrook bus stop, was the first of these citizens of Pom’s mind to shuffle onto the Funny Girls stage. Now with available stage time increasing in inverse proprtion to the size of the FG cast, Pom has boosted her repertoire to include perpetually out-of-breath Irish Olympian Elaine McInerny, delightfully bad lady novelist, Angora Cardigan and the FG token male, John The Poet, a disturbingly familiar creation in brown and Brylcreem.
Pom has lived through more comedy eras in Ireland than most of us, though this is more a resigned admission than a trumpeted boast. She started writing comedy sketches and children’s plays with The Grapevine Arts Centre in Dublin in the early 1980s. She has an impressive list of acting credits, most notably with Rough Magic & The Passion Machine, but comedy persists as a thread throughout her career and she returns to it again and again. She appeared at pioneering clubs in Dublin (all called the Comedy Store it seems, in their eagerness to mirror the rise of “Alternative Comedy” in England at the time). After a stint living in New York she was prominent in the mini comedy boom of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s in Dublin, and was a regular performer on the new circuit here as well as in her one woman show The Mad One with The Hair, which she performed in the Dublin Theatre Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe around that time.
She expresses a dislike for the current comedy scene, a young boy’s club with which she would seem to have little in common, but seems happy to be performing her comedy characters again with Funny Girls. That she is doing so is a triumphant answer to the Dublin comedy promoter in the early ‘90s who took her to task for not being more “stand-uppy”. He warned Pom to look out because “some blonde in a leather jacket was going to come along and blow me away. He just kept going on at me to get a leather jacket. He was obsessed with something I think”.
Just as sharp, intelligent and funny as Pom’s characters are those of former Nuala, Sue Collins. Sue brings her Stoneybatter diva, Carmel, to the mix (front row punters beware, those false eyelashes can maim with a flutter). In the leaner, meaner three woman FG, Carmel is joined by her D4 antithesis, Marian Plunkett-Murphy. Sue’s not long back in the comedy game after a pause to have her first child but now has become “Very big in Dalkey. Carmel did a fashion show there and now people from Dalkey keep calling offering her gigs.”
The FG game plan, to do two or three gigs a month, suits her for the moment as she wants to give much of her time for this year to her infant and couldn’t invest the time and energy involved in pushing her solo show Only Gorgeous or its successors right now. In common with Pom she expresses intentions to return to a solo show in the future, but both are very happy to tour with Funny Girls for the time being.
As much as it is a celebration of female comedy, Funny Girls seems to be at least as much about taking high quality writing and performing to an audience which is different from the usual crowd at the likes of Des Bishop’s The International Comedy Club. “I want to talk about my experience and what I feel, but the audience is full of skinny young girls who just want to shag Des,” Anne laments. “It’s not my constituency. They (Des and other male comics) are a nice bunch of guys and supportive of women in comedy. It’s not a female thing, it’s an age thing. I’m 31 now, you know.”
She describes a less homogenous audience typical of Funny Girls shows to date. “We do get groups of women in their 30s and 40s, but also younger couples and, funnily enough, gangs of teenage boys.” She pauses. “And we have a good solid gay following.” Something there for everyone, then.b

Funny Girls play Glor, Ennis on Friday April 22. There are many more dates later in the year and these can be found listed online at www.dmcwebs.com/funnygirls.