The Brendan Voyage

His most famous sketch is his bouncer/barman routine, but Dublin comedian Brendan Burke is putting together a new show in time for the Edinburgh Festival drawing on his experiences in — wait for it — Baghdad. Please do not adjust your set.

There was actually a time when Burke was not a full-time comedian playing venues like the Laughter Lounge and doing corporate gigs for the Smurfits. Way back when, he earned his crust peering through a telescope in a hospital with the Iran-Iraq war raging outside. As you do. So how did it come to this, you may wonder?

"I worked in microbiology as a lab technician," he explains. "And a friend of mine went over to Baghdad. He sent me a few letters and told me about the craic there. I worked in this hospital which dealt only with referrals, so there were no soldiers coming in from the front. Yet in a way, it was a bit like M*A*S*H. I think that programme was so successful because it was all about the human adaptation to adverse conditions. Humour is probably the best way of coping with any situation in your life.

So we were living in this apartment block — it was like a big Ballymun flat. There was 250 Irish and it was right beside the military camp. This was when Saddam and the Ayatollah were lobbing missiles in at each other. It was really scary, but a lot of comedy comes out of something that wasn't funny at the time."

Despite the chaos outside — this was a decade before the Americans moved in, although both sides were using weapons supplied by Uncle Sam — Burke and his fellow ex-pats still found time, when not frying eggs on the stones, to reminisce about Sally O'Brien riding her bike as they sat over their creamy pints.

"There were two pubs in Baghdad we went to: one we called The Caves, because there'd be all these rats running around under your feet; the other we called The Spit & Vomit, which tells its own story. Their proper names were actually unpronounceable."

But never mind the discomfort, for a comedian there's material in them thar hills.

"The show I'm bringing to Edinburgh," says Burke, "is called One Night In Baghdad and it's gonna be material I already have, but I'm gonna weave it in with events that happened out in the Iraqi capital. Some of the stories that happened out there, you wouldn't write them, they were so ridiculous.

Every night there was a party. And they had a theme. The next morning you'd come into the lab with a hangover, getting the mascara off your face, and pouring acetone over your fingernails to get the nail varnish off. Then you'd have the consultant coming in looking for the same stuff to get the stuff off his nails!

In most hospitals, you have a fairly strict hierarchy of staff, from consultants down to paramedics. But you didn't have that over there. Occasionally, you'd get someone new in and they'd be pulling rank. But I remember there was this doctor and he started off all snooty, but ended up one night lying on top of a nurse, begging for a kiss. It didn't take too long before you got the hang of the set-up."

It appears Iraqi nightlife was all Saddam and Gomorrah for Burke, who explains the cultured, high-minded attitude towards the courting of the opposite sex.

"The new nurses to arrive were known as 'fresh meat'. You used to always know who were the new nurses because they all looked like they needed blood transfusions compared to us and our tans."

Having survived Iraq, Burke is now gearing up for the big one: Edinburgh. In the meantime, he's keeping the smiles on the faces of the rich and famous by palming the corporate punt.

"The last one I did was for Sharon Smurfit. I was on after the string quartet in a big house in Ailesbury Road. I said the last time I was on Ailesbury Road was when I was playing Monopoly. And even then I couldn't afford it."

Brendan Burke will be previewing his show, One Night In Baghdad, in the Laughter Lounge at the end of the month.