There's your stage, there's your microphone, now get on with it - everyone knows the score at the Murphy's Cat Laughs Comedy Festival. And this year's was one of the best, writes Brian Boyd
Ten years on and you should know the drill by now: a gaggle of acts from all points on the compass are parachuted into Kilkenny for the annual Murphy's Cat Laughs laughathon. It never made that much sense back in 1995 - here was a festival that didn't award any prizes, while comedy agents were sidelined and television and radio weren't allowed anywhere near the live material. It was also resolutely a stand-up festival - acts touting "one-man shows" or "ensemble sketch shows" were just politely waved away.
It was confusing at first for the overseas acts - they would arrive with their "management team" anxiously asking what producers and directors they could expect in their audiences. They learnt the easy way though: this is a festival for the sake of it, not an open audition for a sitcom or an opportunity to climb up the comedy career ladder. There's your stage, there's your microphone, now get on with it.
Now that word has filtered around the international comedy circuit about this off-beat affair in a place somewhere between Dublin and Cork, the acts know that they must change for Kilkenny, because Cat Laughs is not going to change for them.
There was an attempt a few years back to use Kilkenny as an "early preview" opportunity for the Edinburgh Festival, but once performers realised that audiences here really didn't care what they did before or after Cat Laughs, an unwritten agreement emerged that everyone would forget all that nonsense and just muck in.
The format still follows the familiar "troika" style: the shows are three-headers, usually involving an American act, a British act and an Irish act. The latter have the advantage of local references, while the British often have a television recognition factor to help them along. Over the years, the American acts have suffered at times - arriving in Kilkenny with sets about local US politics - and they invariably suffered a whole lot more if they were sharing the bill with acts such as Pat Shortt or Tommy Tiernan.
This year, the Americans stole the show. First up was Zach Galifianakis, a regular on the David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien television shows. Performing his set seated at a grand piano, Galifianakis is like Tom Waits with one-liners. He skilfully draws comic pictures - one of a "pretentious illiterate", another of a "lisping gay-basher" - and, though impossible to describe in print, is devastatingly funny.
We learnt from him that the only appropriate time to shout out "I have diarrhoea" is when you're playing Scrabble. He finished his set with a zippy routine about the proliferation of fast-food and coffee-shop franchises ("Starbucks have even opened up a branch in my car").
One of the world's best gag-writers, Emo Philips, made a huge impression with his outré set. He easily won the joke of the festival with a line that can't be repeated here (so strong it drew gasps of shock from a seasoned Watergate Theatre audience). Philips just heaps quality material upon even better quality material and is a sheer pleasure to watch. Trying to trump him was fellow American, and 2003 Perrier Award winner, Demetri Martin.
A child genius turned comic, Martin has well-crafted material that is as cerebral as it is coruscatingly funny. He muses aloud about what is the most intelligent sentence ever to have begun with the word "dude". Along the way he dismisses the possibility of "dude, I've just discovered isotopes". He works the language so well and explains that the phrase "sort of" should always be judiciously used - "You'll find that 'sort of' doesn't really work after 'I love you' or 'You're going to live' at all." Living up to his billing, Martin is a great comic and an endearingly shy and self- effacing person.
Arguably stealing the whole festival, though, was Canadian Mike Wilmot. As opposed to his peers, Wilmot is a "blue- collar" comic who cuts straight to the chase. With 20 years' experience under his belt, he knows exactly how to work an audience and such is his ability that he can bring the crowd with him even when he moves through the gears and goes into (what some may feel is) crude and offensive material. There's a directness here that is appealing, a refreshingly demotic voice among so many "surreal and bizarre" acts. "Old-skool" comedy never sounded so good.
On the Irish front, relative newcomer Neil Delamere made a real impression. Irish comedy has been in a bit of a crisis in recent years, with the same old faces doing the same old jokes, but Delamere, from Co Offaly, displays real potential.
Elsewhere, Tommy Tiernan is getting to the stage where he's so good it's scary. After what seemed like a six-month residency at Dublin's Vicar Street, he is now travelling to an area of greatness that no other Irish comic has dared to visit. And it was great to see Kevin McAleer back with some really sparkling new material. Reminiscent of an Irish E.L. Wisty, McAleer has a unique comic voice which he uses to great effect.
The surprise package this year was Maria Bamford, a Los Angeles comic who was drafted in at a very late stage due to the scheduled act, Caroline Rhea, being unable to travel. Bamford won the Barry Humphries Award at this year's Melbourne Festival and, in shorthand terms, is the female equivalent of Emo Philips. With a stage presence that is somewhere between Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? and Marilyn Monroe, Bamford is deliciously off-kilter.
The 10-year nostalgia trip kicked in with Stephen Dee's Potty Humour exhibition. Featuring Dee's trademark miniature porcelain sculptures of the best acts of the last 10 years, the exhibition also featured video interviews with performers speaking candidly about their various Cat Laughs experiences over the years - the story by Dublin comic Ian Coppinger was so absorbing and downright mad it had to be heard three times. Potty Humour also had huge flash cards for each year of the festival, which neatly summarised all the stories that mattered. And the fact that a lot of the stories involved Johnny Vegas and alcohol is neither here nor there.
There was also a "living art" component to the exhibition, which involved many of this year's performers sitting quietly in a corner on a rotation basis. That was all very well until Deirdre O'Kane turned up for her allocated slot. Sitting so still that people actually thought she was a waxwork, there were some surprised hysterical screams when O'Kane stood up at the end of her allocated time.
In breaking news, the Irish team disgraced themselves again by losing the annual performers' football match to the rest-of-the-world team - to put this in context, the rest-of-the-world team fielded a comedian who has only one leg (Adam Hills). That aside, this was one of the best Murphy's Cat Laughs festivals.
