The Paw and The Glory

Although Dublin comedy troupe Dead Cat Bounce had previously performed together in a 10-piece collective during their time as students in Trinity College, their first gig in their current incarnation – at the Cube space in the Project Arts Centre – didn’t come until January of last year. As DCB member Shane O’Brien explains, it turned out to be a highly eventful evening.

“Someone who happened to write for The Sunday Times was there,” he recalls, “as well as a representative from RTE’s comedy development department, and Will Ferrell. Things really took off from there: we ended up making a pilot with RTE; The Sunday Times wrote a feature about us, which allowed us to do bigger gigs; and Will Ferrell was just a story to tell that seemed to get people interested.”
How did Mr. Ferrell end up attending the gig?
“He happened to be staying in The Clarence across the road,” replies Shane. “He asked the concierge if there was any comedy on, and he obviously didn’t look much past his doorway and said, ‘Yeah, over there.’ It was a really weird crowd, because you had pretty much the biggest comedian in the world there, and people were watching him watching us. So when he laughed, the audience would follow him; if he laughed at anything the crowd didn’t find funny, you’d get all these kind of catch-up laughs afterwards.
“He was a very nice guy though; he came backstage and had a chat with us afterwards. He was there with his brother and his dad, who was a keyboard player with The Righteous Brothers. It was quite cool. I’d say he probably feels a certain amount of pressure himself – because he would have been aware that we knew he was there, that kind of thing. So if he didn’t come backstage, we would have been there going, ‘Oh shit, he hated us.’ If he goes to anything that’s of that scale – a hundred people in a room – he probably has to go and say hello to the performers.
“He was a lovely bloke, although he is freakishly tall. We got our photo taken with him, which is on our Facebook page, and there’s a height difference of about a foot-and-a-half between me and him. I think he was growing his hair at the time for the movie Semi-Pro, so he had a massive ginger afro as well. It’s a pretty weird photo!”
In January of 2009, Dead Cat Bounce aforementioned TV pilot was aired on RTE as part of the Project Ha-Ha series. The past year or so has found the group moving away from exclusively sketch-based shows towards a mix of sketches and musical comedy, and indeed the best moments in the pilot were the musical numbers. In particular, there was one inspired hip-hop skit that featured some stellar, Hype Williams-style visuals (the pilot was in fact directed by acclaimed music video outfit D.A.D.D.Y.)
“It was great,” Shane says of the experience. “RTE gave us a lot of freedom. There are some parts of it that we’re really happy with, and other parts that we’re less happy with. It was a learning curve. We always knew that they were going to broadcast it, and the problem with broadcasting a pilot is that you make your mistakes very publicly. If something didn’t quite work out, that’s what people are going to see. But we learned a huge amount and we’re very grateful to RTE for letting us do it.”
Dead Cat Bounce currently have a number of TV and radio projects at various stages of development, but in the meantime they shall be concentrating on their live shows, including their run at the Bulmers Comedy Festival. The boys get through humorous songs in a number of different genres during their gigs, and Shane reckons that the shift in emphasis towards musical comedy has enabled to group to make a more immediate connection with audiences.
“We did two shows in Edinburgh last year,” he reflects. “One was a sketch show and one was a ’50s-style radio play that had a lot of music and us playing as a band. The one with us as a band was a lot more fun, and went down better with the audience. It’s not necessarily musical parody. There’s some of that, like hip-hop and R’n’B stuff, but also musical sketches. It just seemed to go really well, and the audience leaned more towards it. And every time we’re reviewed, they say that the songs are where we should be.
“We’re happy to go that way, because it’s fun and it’s easy to show up and play music. Everyone can get into music and get behind it, whereas doing a sketch show can be tricky. Sometimes people aren’t used to sketch comedy or else they just don’t like it, so it’s less universal. But I think the music is just something that we’re naturally leaning towards playing more and more. We started playing as a band to do this and we’ve got better as a band.”
What was the initial inspiration for Dead Cat Bounce to start performing together?
“We started in the drama society in Trinity, so we were very much doing comedy shows and plays,” responds Shane. “I don’t think you could say that anyone particularly inspired us, but there a lot of people we would aspire to, like The League Of Gentlemen. Now, you have all the musical comedy as well, with people like Flight Of The Conchords, and we would obviously aspire to that kind of success. I think it just came from all of us watching a lot of TV in the ’80s, and wanting to do stuff based on that.
“Particularly with the early material we used to do, a lot of it was based on ’80s cop shows and stuff like that. They weren’t necessarily supposed to be comedies, but we just found them hilarious. In terms of the way we’re performing now, I don’t think there’s anyone really doing what we’re doing – a band doing a sketch show. It’s a different format and style than people are used to.
“Sometimes we show up in random towns where people know there’s a comedy night on, but they don’t necessarily know who we are, and it takes them a couple of songs or sketches to really tune into it. But people seem to be getting it more and more.”