The Lobster Who Committed Suicide

“Edinburgh is like the Tour De France of the comedy circuit, it’s what you build your whole year around,” says David O’Doherty, a brilliant young Irish comedian making his third appearance at the festival this summer. “I’m premiering my new show here, so it’s exciting from that point of view. Also, it’s the one time in the year when comedy is a bit rock ‘n’ roll – there’s another 600 shows on every hour, because you not only have stand-up shows, but also theatre, music, film etc. So, I don’t know, perhaps some of that glamour is reflected onto us! But from my own point of view, I would say that most of the world’s best comedians are here doing shows, so I actually find it to be a really inspiring time.”
How difficult is it for lesser-known performers to overcome the inevitable audience/critical preoccupation with the headline acts and really make an impression?

“Well, your show definitely does get lost somewhat in the sense that every other gig has a better poster than you and so forth,” offers David. “But by the same token, somewhere along the line an element of self-belief has to kick in. I mean, you would certainly need to have a degree of mental fortitude when it comes to dealing with the inevitable setbacks and disappointments. As with any run, it’s par for the course that on particular nights you’re going to be playing to an audience of five or six people.
“There’s the famous story of the comedian who performed his Edinburgh show one night to a single person. This fellow thought that things were going okay, that the audience really reacted to the big finale. Then when the lights went up at the end, turned out the guy in the audience was a jacket slung over the back of a chair. I think that on many levels sums up what this festival is about.”

In fairness, O’Doherty has a greater chance of making a mark than most. An author of children’s books by day, he has a flair for gloriously surreal monologues, hilarious cocktail-lounge musical flourishes (performed on a vintage Casio keyboard), and off-kilter literary parody (a favourite routine of this writer’s is the light-hearted piss-take of the Frank McCourt school of memoir, relocated to ’80s suburban Ireland and variously titled The Day Father Came Home With The Sodastream and Waiting For Police Academy 8).
O’Doherty’s latest show, meanwhile, certainly bears the hallmarks of post-modern literary device. As Will Self might put it, it’s a creation the genesis of which is entirely congruent with its own queered ontology.

“Its ontology is suspect, alright,” David concurs. “I wrote a show last May that I was going to do in Edinburgh, and I did one preview of it in The International. Not only did nobody laugh, there were a couple of people crying at the end of it – it was the saddest comedy show ever. So the routine I’m doing now is largely about that show and my attempts to make it funny. During the performance, I keep doing flashbacks to where we would have been in the original show, and the various grim things that would have happened in it. So that’s the idea: it’s an attempt to rewrite the saddest show ever as a slightly funnier one.”

Christ! Why was the show so sad in the first place?
“It was about a lobster who commits suicide.”
At this point, I feel compelled to insert a warning for those readers right now having difficulty distinguishing whether this article is dream or reality: this gets weirder than mere crustacean self-immolation.

“The lobster had a dream of becoming a jazz musician, of becoming the next Miles Davis,” David continues, thoroughly flummoxing your normally ice-cool correspondent. “It was the impossible dream really – for reasons that are probably glaringly obvious – but it was more about him doing his best to accomplish it regardless. There was a definite moral to the story which became apparent as it unfolded, but I suppose it’s difficult to sustain the audience’s attention when the subject matter is so thoroughly suffused with such unrelenting sadness and grief.

So I’ve reworked the material and perhaps now it’s more palatable to people generally.”
With the bollocks-o-meter having self-combusted several paragraphs ago, now seems like an appropriate time to steer the conversation back towards more familiar territory (ie. Planet Earth). Typically though, when I enquire as to David’s favourite Edinburgh moment from the past few years, he treats us to a brilliantly askew denouement.
“I remember last year, Daniel Kitson brought an architect up onstage,” he recalls. “He asked him where his favourite building was, and the architect fellow said that it was in Seville. Daniel asked him if he’d ever seen it, and the guy says no, he’s only seen photos. So Daniel had a whip-around in the audience right then and there, put him on the next flight to Seville and got him a place to stay – this is all onstage at the gig.

“The only stipulation was that the architect had to come back two nights later and do a slide presentation of his trip. I think that kind of sums up Edinburgh in a way – these audiences have seen tons and tons of comedy and you always have to come up with something that they don’t expect.”

David O’Doherty performs at The Dublin Fringe Festival in September, and will also be playing support to New Zealand duo Flight Of The Conchords on their forthcoming Irish tour