Mocking their socks off

Shag-tagging. Yep, you heard me right: Shag-tagging. On the way to meet Dara O’Briain in the Morgan Hotel, your reporter noticed a sign hung in the window of a bar, advertising a weekend speed-dating game.

The routine as I understand it, goes something like this: on entry to the bar, you’re assigned a number, and if someone fancies you, they leave a note with the Shagtag Team. Through a system of postings on a communal message board, you can choose whether or not to liaise with interested parties. It’s sort of like a cross between cattlemart courting and Spin the Bottle for over 18s. Dublin dating in the 21st century – a regression to the days of matchmaking festivals.
“That’s fantastic, I’m very impressed with that,” O’Briain remarks when we meet. “That’s animal husbandry on a grand scale! I do remember in college they had the Romeo & Juliet ball, where you’d have to find your counterpart. And then there was the Traffic Light ball where you’d wear green for go, amber for maybe and red for not interested. Essentially Spin the Bottle with STDs. I never did speed dating I’m glad to say, but it seemed like the perfect cynical appreciation of how long it takes to form a lifelong bond with somebody. It’s an evolutionary step. How are things anyway?”
Pretty good as it happens. All the better for watching Live At The Theatre Royal, if the reader will excuse the brazen link. Dara O’Briain exudes the sort of easy familiarity that makes him convivial company, but more to the point, allows him to get away with murder – or at least jokes about murder ­– on a live stage.
Born in February 1972, O’Briain did a degree in mathematics in UCD, where he functioned as auditor of the Literary & Historical Debating Society (he was the Irish Times national debating champion in both English and Irish in 1994) and also acted as the co-editor and co-founder of the University Observer newspaper. After leaving college he cut his teeth on the stand-up circuit, simultaneously embarking on a television career, initially as a presenter of the children’s programme Echo Island, before coming to prominence as team captain on Don’t Feed The Gondolas. He toured relentlessly and established himself with regular stints at the Edinburgh Festival, as well as making a landmark appearance at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal in 2002. His TV career continued to snowball at home (It’s A Family Affair, The Panel) and in the UK (Buried Alive, Bring Me The Head Of Light Entertainment, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Have I Got News For You). He currently fronts the comedy panel gameshow Mock The Week.
Earlier this year, O’Briain undertook his biggest ever tour of the UK and Ireland, culminating in a couple of dates at the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane in London, from which his current DVD is culled.

Peter Murphy: The live DVD format seems especially important to comedians. Stand-ups by nature have to produce a fairly rapid turnover of material in order to hold onto their audience, hence the compulsion to document the shows on film.
Dara O’Briain: It is a weird subset of the entertainment world. If you can get away with them, they’re fantastic. I grew up, at a certain stage, watching Eddie Izzard live, those shows about Romans and their sandals and cats drilling behind things, as a template of how you do comedy, y’know the way these things get burnt into your brain. Now, 15 years later, I’m trying to do that as well. But it is weird. We have this thing about getting our shows out as a chronicle.
Because your format is heavily biased towards audience participation, it’s hard to see the joins between what’s scripted and what’s improvisation.
Your worry is that when people come to see it twice they spot the join – but then again, they also see how much of it is made up. Occasionally you get people who criticise it because there’s too much chat, which wrecks my head. “You come to a live gig and he spends the whole night talking to the audience!” As if this is somehow the easy thing!
Because you’re such an apparently affable figure, you can get away with some pretty heavyweight material.
There’s a touch of that alright. Over there that’s also softened by the Irish accent being regarded as the most charming accent in the world. So you can get away with all sorts of stuff and twinkle and use language…if someone with a harsh East End accent said ‘fuck’ as often as I did, then it would seem a lot more jarring. That’s just a genetic freak and I’ll exploit that as far as I can, but there is some non-threatening aspect to my face, we’ll say, which I’m quite happy to milk.
It’s an approach that’s in marked contrast to the old Lenny Bruce/Bill Hicks comedian-as-shaman/rock star idea
A lot of that is horseshit. Hot Press is not the worst for this by any stretch, but there is a tendency for rock journalists to write about comedy with this notion that danger and anger leads to the best comedy. In English newspapers in particular, music correspondents are usually dispatched to cover comedy, and they’ve set up this model whereby the greatest comedian would be Hicks for example. Hicks was brilliant, but he wasn’t the funniest man on the planet by any stretch of the imagination.
You’re probably among the first generation of Irish performers in England for whom nationality is not a big deal.
That’s exactly it. We are now so subsumed into the middle class and the mainstream in England. In as much as people move on in their fears, at this stage they’ve now moved onto the more exotic dusky threat of the Muslim community. An English person said to me yesterday, “We kind of just feel like you’re one of us.” And it isn’t meant in a kind of colonial way, it’s more that the Irish are like the Scousers or the Scots or whatever, just this pool of people, we’re not “other” in quotation marks anymore. You can no longer trade on any kind of danger in the UK if you talk about the IRA. The easiest fuckin’ jokes in the world to tell! There’s nothing edgy about it. And equally, if you’re a Muslim comic at the moment, the easiest thing is to make a joke about bombings. It’s a doddle. But we're of a generation that are past the stupid Irish people jokes and past being seen as exotic.
There’s a strange idea bubbling under some of your material, a sort of terrorist nostalgia, looking back at the days when you could depend on a bomber to have a footballer’s haircut and a sheepskin jacket.
You’re absolutely right. There is a touch of looking back at the IRA with a gentle, “Awww… weren’t they the great old days of steel and lead.” It’s not that people wish to go back to it, because the Northern Ireland situation was a more oppressive situation than the Muslim situation at the moment. In London there was no paradigm shift when the July bombs went off. Two days after the bombings I was in a comedy club and I told that joke about: “There’s been a bomb on the Picadilly line…well, I can get the Victoria line…” Two days afterwards. All the papers would write, “Is it too soon to make jokes?” And in Edinburgh, people started going, “I’ve heard too many of them; I’m bored with jokes about it now!” We had this weird model presented to us by 9/11, that the place would shut down and it would take a long time to be able to talk about it. But they’re like us, the English, they’ve lived through enough of these things.
Despite the long-standing antagonisms between the two countries, I sensed a sort of sneaking admiration for the stoicism with which Londoners handled those attacks.
I had that as well. Also, because I was living over there, I started referring to myself more as a Londoner on stage. I had a moment where I was sitting at the back of a room watching a gig in Tufnell Park, your typical anonymous North London suburb, and looking around going, “These are the 25-30 ethnicities, moved to London to look for work or whatever, finding their way from Australia or other parts of England.” We are what London is all about: transients who moved to London in our 20s because our careers were centred here, all hanging out together. I got a certain sense of kinship with that: slightly dislocated, but an isn’t-this-a-great-adventure feeling. I don’t feel any huge compulsion to go hang out with the Irish in London; we don’t have Kilburn ballrooms where we go and relive the old days anymore. I did a charity gig last week with Ardal (O’ Hanlon) for the Aisling Foundation, which looks after Irish lads who went over as labourers in the 60s and 70s and became alcoholics and homeless. There’s a hostel, and they bring them back to Ireland for a visit to get them off the drink and with the view that they might return to their families. And I was talking to a man who runs it, and the observation was made that this charity probably won’t need to exist in 30 years time. There won’t be lads coming over and living this isolated life, labouring and drinking for 20 years of their lives. It’s just not happening anymore. Weird to see a charity that will hopefully deal with the problem in this generation.
Seemingly by stealth, you’ve managed to scale the steepest battlements of English popular culture: 9 O’Clock TV.
On BBC 1. Yeah, I did one of those Have I Got News For You shows just after the election and said, “Hello and welcome to the show, I’m Dara O’Briain – see, you voted Labour in again and already immigrants are taking over the place!” It is some mark I suppose that it wouldn’t be regarded as unusual. But the real pioneering work was done by the generation before me, Wogan and all these people.
And Father Ted, which one would’ve thought incomprehensible to the English, and turned out to be no more alien than Monty Python.
Of course. We only have two arrows in our comedy quiver: storytellers like myself or Tommy or Des, we all do it in different ways, or the Ted type Flann O’Brien thing, whereas in England it’s a fantastically broad church of comedy, an amazing place to work because there is an incredible number of styles.
There’s this notion that for the last ten years, Dublin has been an imitation of Thatcher’s Britain: loadsa money, cocaine and tabloid exposes. Presumably you’ve seen the real thing close-up in London. How do they compare?
Eh, not speaking with any huge expertise obviously…
Come on, don’t be coy!
Okay, to answer your question, in London it’s less of a novelty, that whole media world. They did their explosion about 20 years ago to be honest. Everyone has a club that they go to in London, and it’s more of an expediency, because you can’t drink past half ten anywhere else, that’s where you do your boozing. But that whole world feels more well worn. It has less of the thrill of the new about it.
In Ireland the so-called coke epidemic seems like a classic symptom of new money. It’s trickled down from the high rollers through the rapidly expanding middle classes.
I think cocaine is a cultural inhibitor. Cocaine can’t be a particularly useful or creative drug given the very fact that it’s beloved by the financial sector: if the boys in the city are doing it, it can’t be good! One thing that worked in my favour is I moved to London at about 30: my desire to go stumbling around nightclubs was waning at that stage, so I never really made that much of an assault on London in the way that I did here in my 20s for example, falling out of places on Tuesday nights. I got well known in the UK at the stage where I was too fat and bald for anyone to give a fuck who I sleep with. Comedians, nobody gives a shit what their sex life is. Apart from Russell Brand. Which is why Russell Brand is the most famous comedian in the UK at the moment.
He’s completely played up the damaged dandy schtick.
And he’s giving them everything they want, and fair dues to him, but there is a Faustian pact. Russell’s a very, very good live comedian. He’s worth being in the big theatres that he’s going to be in now. He may have taken a short cut to it, but he actually has the chops to do it. I went to see him with that childish, “I hope he fuckin’ dies on his arse” thing, but he is very good. But most comedy careers are much slower than that. I’d be the exact template of how it works: you do Edinburgh, and because of that you get TV, and then you get another thing, and four years later you might be on the TV regularly.
Having worked on the same show as Angus Deayton, you got to see first hand the consequences of misbehaving while working as a TV presenter.
It’s that tremendous tabloid moral relativism, whereby for the benefit of being able to run a splash on you, they’re able to suddenly declare that you’ve been a role model. Previously they never would’ve put you in the Heroes of Britain sentimental parade – but now all of a sudden because you’re a TV presenter…horseshit of the highest order. It’s a bloody TV host for Christ’s sake.
I thought Kate Moss handled it rather gracefully. She made her apologies and that was it: no weeping or wailing or beating her breast.
You’re right. It’s when you do the sackcloth and ashes and “My Hell” stuff… “My Hell? Really? You didn’t seem as if you were in any kind of hell to be honest! You seemed very happy stumbling out of a toilet in Soho House!” But the tabloidism in Ireland, you can tell how that has people freaked out here. You presumed that you could emerge out of Lillie’s with whoever the fuck you wanted on your arm, because Irish journalists and photographers weren’t going to stay up until three in the morning waiting for you to walk out of a fucking nightclub. And I think people have been jarred out of that, and it’s no great development because, as I said, it is that kind of moral expediency to go, “What you’re doing is a disgrace!” And the intrusion of it all. I never talk about my private life in these interviews, because if I ever had to face anything like that, I’d like to think I’d be able to turn around and go, “Listen, when I was selling DVDs, I wasn’t giving you photos of the beautiful interior of my home.” I’m not joining in that game at all.