One-Liner Wonder

Comedy is a way of getting in touch with your inner gobshite. So says Tommy Nicholson, whose inner gobshite is an endless source of brilliant comedy. He may not be Navan s most famous funny man that would involve Messrs. Tiernan, Moran and, well, Navan Man all jostling for position. But the burly, larger-than-life character who sits opposite me in the International Bar deserves to step out of their collective shadow and attract some of the limelight.

A jovial, jocular individual who wears a moustache and gets away with it! by day Nicholson beavers away in a factory in Navan where he lives with his wife and young son, while by night he reels off first-class routines about socially and emotionally inept, unbalanced rural males (he s targeting a wide audience there!) through both conventional gags and his quite surreal poetry.
An irredeemably modest man, in his spare time Nicholson quietly set about concocting a boardgame for film buffs, called, er, Buffs, which almost paid dividends when Channel 4 showed an interest, and he shows me an impeccably designed model of the game he has in mind.
This project alone could one day see him swap the factory gates for the security gates of the supernova rich. But it s his sitcom and play (Not Quite The Full Shilling and PJ Dalton s Dysfunctional Life) which show up his talent for da comedy and which form the basis of his act.
How he came to be doing stand-up is a great story in itself, though.
I hadn t had any luck with the writing, says Nicholson, so I thought if I performed a bit and saw how it went, things might start to happen. So I sent off this tape to the BBC after seeing the address on The Stand-Up Show.
I thought, it s England it s the BBC so if they go for it, I ll probably end up in an oul smoky club in Manchester in the pitch dark and I ll be booed off the stage. I thought: that s the down side but the up side is that no-one here will know !
So I sent the tape off having picked out one of the characters in my script P.J and used the best one-liners I could get. I presented those lines as if they were about me about how I used to live with my mother and we d be so poor and hungry that every Sunday we d sit round a table and stare at a photograph of a mixed grill and at Christmas it d be in colour. And how I never knew my father just the chap who used to come home with my mother! my Uncle Pimp who was a very flashy dresser he had an Italian tailor: St. Vincent De Paul
For a brief moment, Tommy is caught up in his act, excitedly reeling off the punch-lines that so impressed the judges.
So anyway, just after Easter 97, I got a letter back saying I d been picked to perform in the BBC heats of the New Comedy Awards in the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin!
I d never been on a stage before I d never even held a microphone. And there were 1,100 people there. I d never even spoken my material out loud to anyone. It was all only written.
When I got to the Gaiety, I met all the young people who do the comedy Bob Reilly and Deirdre O Kane and Eddie Naessens. I said to Eddie: howya doin? Are you doing comedy long? He said: Not so long. I m an actor . I said: were you ever in anything? . To which he replied, quite indignant: I m in Fair City all the time . Sorry, I said, I m not big into the soaps . Despite that, though, we still became friends.
As put-downs go, this is from the top drawer, but any time spent in the company of Mr. Nicholson shows one-upmanship to be the last thing you d ever expect the Navanite to indulge in. But let s get back to that big night in the Gaiety !
So, me and Bob are sitting up there in this private bar in the Gaiety before the show. This very posh waiter came over and said, excuse me, gentlemen jeez, I was never called that before me in my life! excuse me, but there is a private function on here tonight the Carrolls Comedy Club and it s a private do . He thought we were two down-and-outs who d wandered in off the streets! Two oul scruffs! To which Bob replied, WE RE the bleedin comedians!!! .
But it went well I remember being so nervous, I thought I was going to fall over! Barry Murphy came up to me and said, why don t you go for a walk and come back? . I thought if I walk around, I might not come back! So I stayed where I was and it all went well. The crowd was great!
I didn t think any more would come of it. And I know there s a lot of fellas back where I come from who would have thought, who does he think he is? . But I really did think of the Robert De Niro character in The King Of Comedy who said: better to be king for a day than schmuck for a lifetime .
That show having been such a success, one thing led to
Next thing was I got a call to tell me that I was picked for the Irish heats of the Channel 4 competition, So You Think You re Funny in the International which went really well. That was my second gig and my third was when I was picked to go to the final in Edinburgh to the Gilded Balloon. It was grand.
Since then, Nicholson has done 30-minute stints headlining The International Comedy Club and the Comedy Cellar upstairs in the International Bar, as well as gigs in the Laughter Lounge and at nationwide clubs and festivals.
Of the Irish comedians, he cites the contrasting styles of Michael Mee the king of the one-liner - and Jason Byrne script, what script? as evidence of the healthy diversity of the domestic scene and is full of praise for those who regularly book him!
His personal comedy hero from the past is lovable Goon, Spike Milligan. I remember watching TV in the 70s and all there were were racist jokes. Then along came Spike Milligan and took comedy to another dimension. This pre-dated Monty Python.
And I always loved the persona of Bob Hope on screen: vulnerable, the coward, the self-mockery
all traits, of course, of Nicholson s comedy. Those celebrity golf tournaments can t be far away.