Laughing All The Way To The Bank

It’s always the same, ain’t it? You’re coasting along through life, perfectly delighted with your modest accumulation of €50 in savings, when your heartless, meddlesome bank goes and deposits €66,000 into your account and makes a hames of everything!

It happens, apparently. At least, it happened to Patrick Combs.
“I did it to make a bank teller laugh,” Combs tells me over the phone from his office in California. It was 1995, and a 28-year-old Patrick had just received a piece of junk mail containing a bogus cheque for 95,093 dollars and 35 cents. “It was inseparable in my mind from grabbing a wad of Monopoly money and putting it into the deposit box! I thought, ‘Gosh, if that doesn’t tickle a banker’s fancy there’s nothing you can do!’ I didn’t think it was brilliantly funny, but I thought it was cute and I thought it would be entertaining for me too, ‘cos I knew I would think it was amusing when I got a phone call from my bank trying to explain that the cheque I’d put in wasn’t real!”
But Patrick never got the call. Three weeks later, the money was still in his account. The bank eventually realised its mistake, but Patrick, who had been making ends meet by giving motivational speeches at colleges around the US, fought his case and won.
16 years later, Combs is the bestselling author of three books, the co-founder of two companies and a celebrated performer. His one-man show Man 1, Bank 0 has sold out runs in Lambs Theatre off-Broadway, and picked up awards at comedy festivals in Aspen, Montreal Auckland, San Francisco, Charleston and Winnipeg. If all that hasn’t convinced you that Combs is a good egg, his assistant is probably the chirpiest woman on the planet (“she’s like that every single day,” he chuckles, “I don’t know what it is!”)
Combs is about to bring Man 1, Bank 0 on an 18-date tour of Ireland. Does he reckon his story will resonate with the Irish public, seeing as we’re accustomed to the odd little banking mishap?
“Oh my gosh, It’s made in heaven!” he exclaims. “It’s made in heaven for bumbling, thoughtless banks. I divide banks into two tiers because of what I’ve gone through. There’s the teller level, and I’ve rarely met a teller I didn’t like, and then there’s the upper management level. My bank gave me an incredible comedy show that’s taken us around the world, because they were just so stupid.”
Unsurprisingly, Combs does not attribute his success exclusively to the funny folk at First Interstate Bank. The 44-year-old entrepreneur says a great deal of his ambition comes from time spent managing rock bands in San Francisco in the early ‘90s (fun fact: he was the first person to book pop rockers Counting Crows!)
“One of the luckiest points in my life is that I feel that I was raised by musicians when it truly mattered. When other people were majoring in bullshit things and they were starting to think about bullshit directions to go in their lives, I was watching musicians go for it at all costs. In the front room, their windows were taped off and it was dedicated to a music studio. Their furniture was milk crates. There was one seminal moment in my life when Tom (a musician friend) took off his headphones for a minute and yelled ‘Follow your bliss!’ and he meant it.”
When it comes to the art of the one-man show, Combs has two very different idols.
“Years before the cheque thing happened,” he recalls, “my girlfriend took me to see Spalding Gray and it blew my mind. This guy just walked out on stage and he took a sip of water and he told us a story that was riveting and hilarious for two hours. I never imagined such a thing. When I walked out I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I just saw no possible way to do it. I just felt way too insecure, I felt too far away, it felt impossible but I knew I wanted to do it, I started to talk about it in the car with my girlfriend. I was like ‘I would love to do that someday’, and she turns to me and goes, ‘Yeah, but you’d have to be funny!’
‘Then, I was somewhere in the country, I’d done an inspirational speech during the day and I walked up to my hotel room and I flicked on the TV and John Leguizamo, who is the best of the best in my book, was beaming back at me through HBO. It made me sick, it made me physically ill! It made me ill that he was doing it and I wasn’t! And it made me ill that I felt I couldn’t do it, that I could never do it. As if Spading Gray hadn’t set the bar high enough!”
With Gray and Leguizamo as his inspiration, Combs was adamant that he would make a home for himself on the stage.
“I still don’t really understand how it happened,” he laughs, “but it’s happening, and it’s a great pleasure. It’s my favourite thing to do in the world, because when you do it right, it’s the greatest feeling ever. When it all comes together, it’s almost an out of body experience. I look out and I say ‘Oh my God, these people are vastly enjoying themselves! They are on a ride! They are laughing! They are engrossed! And we’ve been at this for two hours!’
‘All I’ve ever wanted to do is to walk on stage where someone will have me and just lay my cards on the table, good and bad, about what the road to my successes have looked like. ‘Cos they’ve been messy, they’ve been difficult, they’ve been wrought with insecurity, they’ve been piled high with failure, but they’ve been a fucking blast!”

Man 1, Bank 0 comes to 18 Irish venues from June 1 – 29, including shows in Balor Arts Theatre, Donegal (1), the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny (4), the Everyman Palace, Cork (12), the Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick (13,14), The Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire (22) and the Town Hall Theatre, Galway (25). For the full list of dates, see man1bank0.com.