A weekend at Kilkenny's Cat Laughs: an odd appeal for privacy, a bad bank for toxic material, and a subversive comic – but then, controversy is often simply comedy out of context, writes PETER CRAWLEY.

HERE COMES Tommy Tiernan. Now this should be rabidly, enjoyably controversial. After all, we are a nation still reeling from the Ryan report, a catalogue of systematic abuse and horrors. There is a blasphemy bill on the cards, not only a cynical manoeuvre at a time of political meltdown, but a throwback to the insidious culture of religious control that the report indicts, and a matter presumably close to Tiernan’s heart, who has twice been accused of sacrilege in the Irish Senate.

Then there are the small matters – the local elections, the global depression, Obama, Cowen, Swine Flu, Pat Kenny . . . a comedian at the 15th Cat Laughs Festival hardly wants for material.

Tiernan, dapper as a tailor’s model, takes to the stage with sweeping momentum and opens his set with a manic laugh. A comedy gig is a sacred, protected space set apart from the hypocrites and liars of society, he explains, albeit in slightly different words and with a bit more swearing.

"There are no rules here. You don't come to a comedy gig with a notebook,stealing jokes, telling the outside worldwhat happened here. I saw you.You're not welcome here.You know who you are!" Atta boy, Tommy, stick it to The Man.

It’s an excellent point. Neither Tiernan nor the Cat Laughs festival – now sponsored by Carlsberg – are strangers to controversy, and, nine times out of 10, controversy is simply comedy out of context. More people will want to know about a Tiernan performance than any over-heated under-ventilated hotel basement venue can accommodate. But if they read in an over-heated, under-ventilated review that Tiernan’s current routine involves a shockingly effective joke about an airport security guard implicitly condoning paedophilia among celebrities, they may take it up the wrong way. That old adage still holds: You had to be there.

So what’s the best way of letting the world know that the English comedian Dave Gorman is tear-streamingly hilarious? His act is so dependent on beautifully detailed anecdotes, delivered with the soft urgency of a confidential whisper, that it’s next to impossible to steal a single line from his arsenal. His advice is always worth passing on, though. One way to gain the upper hand in a relationship, Gorman tells us, is to let on that your partner talks in their sleep. When asked what they say, feign embarrassment and reply: “Well, actually, it’s a little bit racist.”

Evil. Genius.

It’s a gag almost worthy of the Dark Show, if the Dark Show actually had the barest notion of what it’s for. Presumably alive to a surge in off-colour material from comics and perhaps weary from fighting dumb press controversies, last year the festival introduced a gig to encourage taboo-busting, molasses-black, sinister material that other gigs wouldn’t ordinarily want to touch – in short, a “bad bank” for the toxic material.

The inevitable problem, as correctly anticipated and archly deflated by last year’s compère Kevin Gildea, is that an audience which pays to be shocked will never be shocked. (For the desired effect, the Dark Show would have to be more warped, be performed atnoon in a children’s park and be renamed “The Inoffensive Family-Fun Hour!”) As it is, in a culture where the word “edgy” has been so devalued that even professional cheeky chappie Andrew Maxwell can host such a show, the material is less dark than simply off-bright. Maxwell, bless him, gives out about RTÉ again and uses harsh language in connection with Fianna Fáil because, you see, he is a political comedian and can’t be tamed.

Mercifully, Reginald D Hunter is also on the bill and knows precisely how to match personality to the job at hand. Hunter, for anyone lucky enough to yet discover him, has a seductively warm, attractive presence with a fast-blinking, faux-naive sincerity that makes his jokes – some of them genuinely edgy – brilliantly effective. “The Dark Show,” he muses, “and I’m the only nigger here.” By the time he reaches his big finish, with a gag that would have most people excommunicated, extradited or incarcerated, but which in his hands would have your grand-aunt in stitches, he seems impossible to follow. Andrew Maxwell returns, though, to talk about football.

Speaking of which, the result of this year’s comically serious football match between Ireland and the Rest of the World was not a matter of national pride. To quote match commentator Karl Spain: “The 11 players from the Rest of the World are leading 3-1 against the 13 players for Ireland. In fairness, though, one of them is Andrew Maxwell.”

It was a fun game on a beautiful day, but the score was an uncanny reflection of the unofficial rivalry of the festival, one in which the visiting team scored more frequently. (At the end of the day, though, comedy was the winner.)

Man of the match, unquestionably, goes to a Dutch comedian by the name of Hans Teeuwen. People will have wildly different memories of Teeuwen from this gig, but, as host Adam Hills correctly pointed out, no one will ever forget him. Looking a little like a younger, shaven, more unhinged Jeff Bridges, Teeuwen is divisive in the way that Marmite might be considered divisive, if Marmite was also radioactive and militantly pro-choice. His comedy is not only a matter of taste, it requires an irony threshold the size of a postal district and enough familiarity with comedy to know just how subversive he is being. In short, he is revolutionary.

Hills and his co-host of A Spotlight on Hans Teeuwen, Jason Byrne, might seem to suit Teeuwen, in that one of them is a warmly embraced foreigner and the other was once widely considered “a bit mad”, but really they bear as much similarity to Teeuwen in outlook and appeal as Coca-Cola does to al-Qaeda. At a crude estimate, 80 per cent of the audience actively despise Teeuwen, whose comedy – referencing non-existent TV shows, rewriting Mozart, inventing sing-alongs that contain neither rhymes, rhythm or structure, complaining about Disney’s romanticised take on the Holocaust – is meticulously, painstakingly designed to fail. This, of course, is hilarious to 20 per cent of the audience, who love it more because the people next to them are frozen out. “Don’t you think we have created a nice atmosphere?” asks Teeuwen, now that streams of punters have departed, others are muttering volubly and his best heckler has snogged him. “It’s a bit divided. But that’s art.”

He’s right.

Teeuwen will not revolutionise comedy, which is now, always has been and forever shall be, an enormous commercial empire founded on gigs, bars, DVDs and TV panel shows. But it’s nice to see Hills and Byrne genuinely stunned as they return to placate the crowd with their soothing double act, praising Teeuwen, worrying about their own gigs, and realising that as their generation of comics slide into middle-age and responsibility, there is still a dim possibility that comedy could be edgy again.

Neither Dead Cat Bounce, an act with so many talents they have to parcel them out in separate sketch shows and music revues, nor David O’Doherty, still this country’s best unassuming comedian, could be said to be living on the edge. But DCB are an exercise in studied brilliance, nailing every music genre from hair metal to power ballad to RB while deftly breathing new life – and more impressively, new jokes – into what ought to be a spent format.

This year, O’Doherty managed to reaffirm a belief in live comedy with a routine based on killing someone using various board games (FYI: Twister is the easiest and most forensically clean). Then he goes and spoils it all by doing something like Messing With YouTube, in which he scours the interweb with Barry Murphy for clips of people falling down holes on Slovenian public television. Many of these clips will have been unseen by audience members unfamiliar with offices, e-mail and electricity, but, mercifully, their internet connection failed midway and the show bumbled to a halt.

Even if Fred MacAuley was not the only comic to note that audiences were conspicuously thinner for this year’s festival, this online threat to the stand-up comedy industry seems more fundamental than the recession. It’s nice to see, then, that no heckler or critic is a match for a temperamental wireless router.

Besides, YouTube could never be a good home to Andrew Laurence, whom most people will describe as the grown-up version of the kid from The Omen. The more unsettling truth is that this thin, pale, monotone, astoundingly edgy Londoner is exactly what you would get if you fused together Frank Spencer and Hannibal Lecter. Closing the Dark Show with what appeared to be a very earnest, very strained offer to defecate onstage, Laurence had a still more unnerving quip up his sleeve (or a mystery guest behind the curtain, if you believed him) which elicited an amazing audible response from an audience somewhere between a laugh, a gasp, and a groan. I stole the joke, smuggled it into my notebook and wondered how it might play with the outside world.

Then again, as Tommy Tiernan might put it, some things are unrepeatable.

Stolen lines

Best Audience Provocation David O'Doherty:"Scrabble can go f**k itself . . . What's the matter? Too real for you, Kilkenny?"

Best Audience Heckle Hans Teeuwen:"Years ago, back when I was . . . " Audience member: "Funny?"

Best Comic-to-Heckler Response Reginald D Hunter:"The joke was good but the timing was s**t."

Best Response to Ingrained Male Chauvinism That Somehow Still Persists Among Stand-Ups Lower Down The Bill Than Her Maeve Higgins:"I know I'm a woman, so I'll try not to talk too much."

Best Case of Mistaken English Identity (three-way tie)When Hans Teeuwen called the audience "English", then immediately corrected it to "British". When Karl Spain identified Welsh comedian Milton Jones as "English". When David O'Doherty balled out Chris Rock for recently referring to Ireland having the queen on its bank notes. "I think you'll find, Chris, there's been a long and involved debate on the matter going back to the 12th century."

Best Capitulation of the Fourth Estate to the Strange Demand for Privacy by a Comedian Giving a Public PerformanceWell, to quote Tommy Tiernan, "[quote redacted]".