Pat Shortt is less a mere man and more an alternative structure for government.
The musician, actor and funnyman plots his comedy campaigns, James Bond villain-style, from a nerve centre buried unobtrusively in an industrial estate in Limerick city.
As well as serving as administrative centre for the Shortt Empire, the building is kitted out with audio and video production facilities. It has hosted live shows and, should an emergency arise, includes an underground silo capable of launching most major types of earth-orbiting death-ray devices.
The latter is not true of course. It would be superfluous in any case. Who needs to dominate Ireland from space when you can, at will, strap on a fat suit and tap into the nation’s dark rural underbelly?
Pat’s phenomenal success as a comedian has been a long and triumphant succession of assaults on the halls and theatres of Ireland by an army of characters from rural Ireland. His evocations of the countryside resonate so deeply with his audience that you will often find them rolling, literally, in the aisles. A case in point is The Builder, one of Pat’s new comic incarnations and part of the current show, You Won’t Get Away With That Here.
“What I do is rural stuff,” Pat says. “I’m not a stand up. I don’t tell jokes. I do character comedy. It’s about body language. In the first three minutes that the builder character is on stage, there’s no talking at all. But fellas are rolling around laughing at him in the aisles”.
Pat’s characters are indeed “rural stuff”. Then again, even post-Tiger, aren’t we all, not too far beneath the surface? Pat’s performances reach the parts that Tigers don’t reach.
An example is the community hall in You Won’t Get Away With That Here, which is threatened with closure. This is the platform for a succession of characters, who turn out in force to bid farewell to the hall. The scene is quintessential Shortt, who puts his finger on pomp and smallness of a certain region of Irishness. The audience recognises someone they know, or someone their cousin in Nenagh knows.
Look again and they might recognise something internalised in themselves. You wouldn’t necessarily think of Pat as Ireland’s leading satirist, but that’s what he truly is. Not the clunky satire of picking on current events and figures and lampooning them. That’s shooting fish in a barrel. Pat understand and embodies in his characters the tribal waters in which those fish are swimming.
Pat’s cleverly disingenuous rustic buffoonery has recently been on our screens in two series of his sitcom Killnascully. The careful control exercised by Pat over his world in his live stage shows is very evident in Killnascully as well.
Pat co-writes and produces the series from the above-mentioned lair in Limerick and also plays a number of the characters in the series. If he could bend the limits of his own physicality it is entirely possible he’d play the lot.
It’s a fine example of Shortt’s milieu; a heightened reality residing somewhere between Ballykissangel and Father Ted, borrowing some of the production values from the former and sharing some of the qualities of the latter’s surreal and sealed-off world. It’s a unique mixture of music-hall grotesque coupled with an almost literary observation of Irish character.
Music hall gusto is in evidence in Pat’s live shows, too. His characters are larger than life and masters of the harmless single entendre. They typically include the blustering and self-important, such as the local councillor or TD, as well as affectionately portrayed women of a certain age.
Such affection does not extend to the process of realising the female characters however. If you think Pat enjoys the drag think again.
Nonetheless, he is always keenly aware of what his punters like, hence the new character of Dympna the air hostess in You Won’t Get Away With That Here.
“I don’t like the female roles. It’s physically uncomfortable. But the nurse [in Pat’s previous stage show] worked so well that I decided to put Dympna in this one. She’s an older, frumpy air hostess and she pines for the old days on TWA when there was glamour attached to the job. These days with Internet tickets and so on, sure you wouldn’t know who’d be sitting on the aircraft! I added her to the show because you need variety and not just a succession of male characters one after the other. And I made her an air hostess because people now fly so much more and it’s part of our common experience.”
Pat works fierce hard, and has done since the old days with Jon Kenny in D’Unbelievables.
The community hall in You Won’t Get Away With That Here is very much a return to Pat’s comedy performing roots.
It’s a bit more salubrious for him now with his solo shows being staged in the many well-appointed arts theatres the country boasts and in large well-appointed hotel function rooms.
But he still drives himself and his small crew hard, playing many shows when he goes on tour, although the workload has diminished somewhat recently as he focuses more on other activities.
Currently, he is looking at the possibility of appearing in a couple of films in 2006, following up his roles in Man About Dog and Inside I’m Dancing, last year. Additionally, he is already working on series three of Killnascully.
With all that going on he’ll be hard pressed to put in the 200 or so performances of this new show in 2006 which he achieved with his previous show.
So vast is the army of devotees built up by Pat’s live audience that, on his own, Shortt is practically a career option for other comics who would otherwise struggle to achieve his almost unique level of live exposure in Ireland (only Tommy Tiernan is in the same league).
Joe Rooney supported Pat for most of his first big solo tour. Then Joe went back with his own show and has built on the audience first gained from Shortt fans who saw him warm up for the main man.
As a closing remark, I note, with some satisfaction, that comedian Ian Coppinger is in residence for that opening 20 minute slot, a bonus for anyone planning to get to the show and an unparalleled opportunity for Coppinger to get his face and gags in front of The Plain People of Ireland.