The woman on my left has spent the last six months watching snuff movies (research), the man on my right is throwing up (Bacardi) and there, in the foreground, Johnny Vegas is singing Wham's Club Tropicana. The most disturbing aspect of this tableau is that the song sounds great.
File under "Only in Kilkenny". Seven years a-laughing and Murphy's Cat Laughs Festival is now an institution - both punter- and performer-friendly. Doing what it says on the tin, it's an international stand-up festival. No revue, no sketches, no "comedy drama", just one person and a mike, whispering, muttering, screaming or shouting, however the mood takes. With all the multi-media, interactive hype hanging around arts festivals these days, there's something blithely old-school about the way Cat Laughs conducts itself. Here are the acts, here's the venue. Sit, listen and tick the box accordingly.
This is the routine: every bank holiday in June, 70 comics are parachuted into the city, from the US, Canada, Australia, Scotland, England and all points nearer. It's a masterclass in what's what and who's who in the world of stand-up. We look on as trends are discerned, new heroes are discovered, transatlantic talk is decoded and standing ovations are earned. All the fun of the festival is played out over five head-banging nights of hopping, skipping and jumping between venues, styles and genders.
Dizzying, infuriating, exhilarating and exhausting (and that's just the train journey down), this year's shebang featured a rake of unknown Americans, some familiar faces from BBC and Channel 4, a gaggle of shiny, happy local acts and the odd nutter. All grist to this mill, as we tear ourselves away from the delights of our hotel room trouser press (a bit of imagination goes a long way), dip our pen in blood and head out into the night looking for a critical ruck.
The cats in the street are all talking about Daniel Kitson. A relative newcomer from that comedy capital called Barnsley, Kitson looks like Jim Royle's younger brother. It's quite OK to pass remarks on his physical appearance as he introduces himself to the audience in the Zoo Bar (a wine bar, changing-social-demographic fans) as looking like "a cross between a university lecturer and a paedophile". We're still wondering about the efficacy of this description when a heckler - who couldn't be described as having a PhD in the subject - makes his presence very vocally felt. Giving up all notions of anything "reformed" or "alternative", Kitson reverts to end-of-pier mode to demolish the poor man with some withering remarks, which so hit the mark that the apprentice heckler raises a metaphorical white flag.
Back to the material proper and Kitson reveals himself to be an Ealing Comedy version of Kes. Having described falling from "the ugly tree" (and hitting all the branches on the way down), he regales us with his experiences of growing up with a bad stutter, an even worse lisp and jam-jar glasses. If he had looked any worse, he tells us, "there would have been a fund set up to send me to Disneyland". Fabulously inventive, he talks about his skirmishes with a speech therapist the way people used to talk about three men walking into a bar.
Between one thing and another though (perhaps the excitement of playing in a wine bar), he didn't get around to delivering very much material, instead needlessly getting involved in too much audience banter. Indeed, the next time a comic feels the need to dip his microphone into the audience and ask "so where are you from?", the standard response should be: "I'm from the box office, where I've just paid £14 to come and see you do some material, not ask people in the audience where they come from." Or something.
Still, there's enough comedy magic going on in Kitson's dysmorphic mind to justify a "highly recommended" sticker. The beard has to go though. It will only scare off the youth vote.
Joining Kitson on the bill immediately, and some wry observations on the GAA's rule 21 jolly things along. Not that Mallon is parochial; he is affable and talented and can stretch himself to most anything. Maybe a TV producer really should take a look.
A bag of chips and something tepid and tedious in a bottle later and it's high time for Adam Hills who, although Australian, is honorary Irish by dint of living in Dublin. High-energy and very likeable, he gives us a version of the real history of Australia that is a hoot and a half and he succeeds in making some serious points about disability with aplomb and good grace.
The latter two characteristics Hickey is a former Dublin hairdresser whose ridiculously banal world-view is part OK magazine and part bus-stop banter. Dressed in thrift-shop chic and sporting the type of "blonde" hair that fools nobody, she's a supremely irritating and challenging person. And when she does say something funny, it's accidental. The creation of talented comic actress Deirdre O'Kane, Crystal Hickey is a cult in the making. O'Kane flexes her considerable acting muscles to conjure up a character that is frighteningly real. With Hickey, you don't know whether to laugh or cry, or indeed whether to buy her a Babycham and listen to her Twink anecdotes.
And for something completely different, there is everyone's favourite revolutionary socialist comic, Mark Steel, a columnist with the Guardian newspaper until he was fired. As a card-carrying Trotskyite, he is , Reasons To Be Cheerful, a memoir of hard-left activism.
Steel is someone whose life is book-ended by the appearance of the Sex Pistols and the disappearance of Clause Four.
I've never met a Trot I didn't like, but that still doesn't stop me being a bit wary of an English person who knows more about Irish history than I do - usually because you can anticipate the punchline. Steel's warmth and blokeishness (in the old-fashioned meaning of the world) are so endearing that you just know that the historic inevitability of which he speaks will be followed by a nice cup of tea.
And there's more: Barry Murphy's German alter ego, Gunter, is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is satirical. At times this year it seemed as if all of Kilkenny was resounding to Gunter's catch-phrase "you pixie-headed fuck". He deserves to be bigger than Riverdance and the Corrs put together.
