The alter-ego has landed

Irish comedian PJ Gallagher has done it all. Big shows like the Electric Picnic last year, Letterkenny and Kilkenny this year, intimate venues such as Vicar Street and two television series. But has he ever fucked up on stage? He has, actually, and he admits it.

“I was doing this corporate – a show for a glue company from Sweden,” he recalls. “None of them seemed to speak English. Anyway, I went on and did my stand-up thing for about 15 minutes to total silence, until this bloke stood up in the audience and said, ‘Vee zon’t understand vot you are speaking!’ But all I could do was carry on, and then this other guy came on stage and just took the mike away! And that was it. The gig was over. Fortunately we’d been paid earlier. So I just legged it! I don’t know why they booked me in the first place.”
Gallagher is probably best known for his role as Jake Stevens in RTE’s Naked Camera, two series of which have already been filmed, although he suspects a third season might be difficult.
“We’ve tried to do another series, but the problem is, everybody out there knows us now,” he explains. “To give you an example, me and Patrick McDonnell went down to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and got so well made up that we wouldn’t even recognise each other. I was going to pretend I was a Gulf War veteran in a wheelchair. But the minute we got out onto the street, this bloke spotted us straightaway and took a photo of us with his mobile camera! So much for the make-up! So it’s just getting too hard to get away with it.”
Which is a pity, because PJ has his own view as to how the Irish attitude to comedy is different from other nations.
“People in Ireland love wind-ups and taking the piss,” he says. “Even if they’re the ones who are the victims, all other considerations go out the window if it means helping the gag work. Even people on the street can become aggressively helpful and that makes it easier to set up the gags. There was that guy in Kerry who was helping me get a pair of handcuffs off. He knew I must’ve been a fugitive, but that was a minor matter compared to the fact that he was helping somebody who asked for help. It’s like there’s something of the subversive in all of us.”
So is there anything of Gallagher himself bottled up in his Naked Camera character of Jake Stevens? Gallagher quakes at the very idea.
“Jesus, I hope not! He’s such a fucking monster! If there is any of him in me I hope it’s buried way down deep and never comes out!”
Comedy fans often marvel at how comics like Gallagher can do uproariously funny sketches without cracking themselves up. So what’s the secret?
“I can’t speak for other stand-ups, but I’m probably one of the most nervous comedians in the world. I’m usually shitting myself when I’m doing it. I’m so focused on getting through the gag that I don’t have time to think it’s funny. Sometimes I ad-lib something and it’s only when I see the replay that I realise that it might have been a bit funny after all. I only remember losing it once, when I was doing a sketch about a dog and a sauna and this woman asked me to talk to a vegetarian first. She meant veterinarian!”
With Gallagher now literally a star of stage and screen, I wonder if he has to adjust in any way before he performs in either medium?
“When we’re doing stuff for Naked Camera, we have the luxury of trying a gag and if it doesn’t work we can either try it again or dump it,” he says. “But you couldn’t do that on stage, especially for corporate gigs where they kind of expect you do your greatest hits like a rock band.”
Speaking of which, there was a time when comedy was branded as the new rock’n’roll. Now comics are performing alongside rock bands at events like the Electric Picnic.
“There was a time when it seemed that everybody in Ireland just wanted to be in a rock band,” Gallagher says. “Nothing else mattered. Now it seems that they all want to be comedians. Soon there’ll be more comedians than musicians. Even as it is, the comedy scene is getting so big that you have the International Bar scene where I started, and you have the Ha’penny Bridge gang and we hardly ever meet. We could be on two different planets, yet they’re only a few streets away from each other.”
Also appearing on the Electric Picnic bill is Gallagher’s own personal hero Jason Byrne.
“Jason is without doubt the best comedian in the world,” he enthuses. “He’s the only comedian who can do a two-hour show and not repeat a single gag from his last show. He’s definitely my main inspiration, the real reason I got into comedy in the first place.”
So who else is he looking forward to at the Picnic?
“There’s this guy called Dr. Cocacolamcdonalds. I saw him at Letterkenny. Nobody knew who the hell he was and he came along and did a show like I’ve never seen before. To describe him as nuts is putting it mildly. He wears make-up a bit like a clown and he’s totally off the wall. He does these songs playing the first ever model of the Casio keyboard. He’s outrageous. If you haven’t seem him before you have no idea what you’re letting yourself in for.”