Sweat And The City

It’s June and it’s hot. Too hot for an old comedy dog such as myself to be drinking cider out of doors.
Your young up-and-coming types are probably out in the thick of it, skateboarding and writing pithy one-liners about media messaging on the fly.
I can’t be doing likewise. Instead I scuttle into the shade of the office and get on the blower to another seasoned old comedy canine. It’s Karl McDermott and I call him on his land-line for two reasons.
Firstly, I know a chap of his vintage and disposition will be patriotically indoors, seeking what natural darkness Ireland can muster in the face of this foreign solar onslaught.
Secondly, he doesn’t have a mobile. What a magnificent hold-out. We’re talking Old School and no mistaking.

When I met Karl and performed with him in the early days of Dublin’s Comedy Cellar in ‘88/’89, he was already someone whose experience and relative polish and craft made him a figure of respect.
Unfortunately his anorak and his downtrodden Galwegian-victim disposition made him the object of more unkind appreciation.
Karl possesses a highly developed comic neurosis, a quality which permeates his persona and his work and has on more than one occasion led to his name and Woody Allen’s sharing the same breath.
Back then you could count male solo comedy performers on the toes of one foot even if you were a three-toed sloth. There was me, Alex Lyons and Karl providing solitary intervals to break up the old Cellar’s sketch-based mainstay. Karl is a highly skilled and literate writer and the combination of this with his considerable character-acting ability gave rise to performances which were more comedy-theatre than stand up in the narrow sense.
Back in the early ‘90s the character of live stand-up here was quite different to the current scene, with a broader church of different comedy acts basically making it up as they went along.
Definitely, though not entirely uniquely, Karl’s milieu was more in tune with those times than the current vogue for straight businesslike stand-up served in 20 or 40 minute sets to an audience fat on a diet of processed, niche-TV scheduling.
Karl has performed less in recent years – his last live foray was four years ago and took the form of the Johnny Schilacci character on whom his forthcoming RTE Radio sitcom series is based.
“I’m just tried of it”, he observes ruefully, “I’m 84. I’m not really tuned in. If I do my James Finlayson [ the dour Scottish comic actor with balding dome and ‘tache who graced many Laurel & Hardy movies ] impression now people think it’s Homer Simpson. Most of my references come from between 1925 and 1975, which was okay even in the early ‘90s but now…”
Don’t mind the downbeat shtick, though. Karl’s performing CV is impressive. His first one-man show, Memoirs Of A Midget, had a successful run in The Abbey in 1989, while his second, Toilet Break toured Ireland and England in 1990 and was followed up in 1991 with one of the surprise hits of the Edinburgh Fringe, his third one-man show An Afternoon With Klaus Barbie’s Pen Pal. Further Edinburgh outings included 1992's (Monrovia, Monrovia) and 1993 (Stand Up Stories).
It was around 1993 that Karl did the obligatory London stint. We both recall a gig in The Balham Banana in south London where Karl followed me on, leaving the audience wondering out loud how you could possibly have two Irish acts in succession.
London was hard going. “It’s tough unless you move on up quickly. Otherwise you get stuck at a certain level; getting the gigs but always going on in the first half and not really breaking through.”
It is with something close to the quiet pride with which he professes his lack of a cell phone that Karl admits he knows little of the current Irish stand-up scene. “I have no idea what the quality is like but it has become sexy to have stand-up comedy as a career. Once Ardal [O’Hanlon] and Dylan [Moran] got big, when 21-year-olds announce that they are going for a comedy career, their parents think ‘Okay’”.
The inexorable tide of mobile communications from the mid ‘90s coincided with a sea-change in Karl’s work with the vast bulk of his output being in TV and especially radio as both a performer and increasingly a writer.
In 1996 he was commissioned to write a six-part radio sitcom for BBC Radio 4. It was called The Mahaffeys and received good notices when it was broadcast in 1997. The Daily Mail called it “quirky, quick on its feet and funny”, The London Independent called it “slick, fast and silly”, The Mail On Sunday praised it as “pure joy” while The Observer described it as “witty enough to become a cult favourite”.
Karl’s writing and acting output has been steady since then, with a number of productions aired on RTE Radio. The latest, Here’s Johnny, follows a former American mobster, Johnny Schilacci, who is moved to a leafy Dublin suburb where he poses as a writer as part of a witness protection scheme. Before long Johnny discovers someone in a similar situation and the lid starts to lift off the whole mobsters-posing-as-writers-in-Ireland can of worms. The series will be broadcast in August. Karl, bursting with affirmative confidence as ever, expects it will hit its target demographic in our hospices and the quieter parts of Ballybunion.
Karl does act in the series, but doesn’t reprise the original stage version of the character. That duty is taken on by Crazy Dog Audio stalwart and sound-booth prodigy Morgan C. Jones. A strong cast of comedy actors is completed by Tara Flynn, Michael McElhatton (with whom Karl acted in Paths To Freedom) and Joe Taylor.
Meanwhile Karl is resident in what he describes as a place, nay a country, of Desperation called ‘Film In Development’.
“It’s where people go when they stop performing,” he warns me, somewhat unnecessarily. He has had a film script grinding its way through development for some time now and the careful process of removing all traces of the reason for writing it in the first place is moving on apace.
More gratifyingly he wrote the script for a movie in the “Short Sorts” series which will premier this year in his native Galway.
It’s called Eggs and his description of it as a ‘clerical’ Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers rolls off the tongue in the manner of one honed, if not ground down, by prolonged exposure to the pith of the pitch.
This is a neat line, but it’s not his best. That comes out when he reveals that he has a further interest in place off the shores of ‘Film In Development, known as ‘Novel In The Pipeline’.
Karl has one of these neatly written in his immaculate copperplate on pristine foolscap. It’s called ‘The Creative Lower Being’ and you can almost smell the dust cover when he declares it to be “Larry David meets Proust meets Macra na Feirme”.
Sounds like just the thing for the octogenarian comedian to chuckle the hours away to while he seeks refuge in a cold bath with the bathroom curtains drawn closed in his house on a hot summer’s day and his phone off the hook. And no mobile.