The offensive stuff in this year’s Cat Laughs comedy festival was meant to be in The Dark Show – but comedians weren’t slow to break the boundaries
HOW DO YOU take your comedy? In the spirit it is intended or with great offence? Do you prefer it black, unsweetened and a little bitter, or served with just a splash of the milk of human kindness? When it comes to acceptable subjects for riffs and one-liners, do you choose Horlicks over the Holocaust, observational over offensive, drawing the line before sexism, homophobia, or paedophilia? Or are you, like most people, somewhere in between, never sure whether the next line will raise a chuckle or meet a gasp?
This year at the Smithwick’s Cat Laughs Comedy Festival you could be forgiven for thinking that comedy had been split into two opposing camps, the programme divided between the light and the dark. Now into its 14th year of mirth and mild controversy, the festival even cordoned off an area this year for offensive material – or rather, the jokes a comedian would think twice over before uttering in a regular gig – called The Dark Show. Its cheery counterbalance may have arrived in the whimsical shape of Josie Long, whose darkest material consisted of a doting attention to misspelled notes and misleading shop signs, like Lynne Truss without the glowering disapproval.
Of course comedy doesn’t really work in extremes. For all the determined nastiness of The Dark Show, the most controversial performances came from outside its boundaries. And for all Josie Long’s determined emphasis on the upbeat, she doesn’t have a monopoly on cuddly sentiment. Every act is a blend of light and shade.
The first mutterings of offence came from usual suspects, Tommy Tiernan and Dom Irrera. The word was that Tiernan had prompted walkouts (which the festival has denied) for a joke involving Madeleine McCann, while US comedian Irrera provoked his expected levels of discomfort by lasciviously outlining the attractions of 14-year-old girls.
Perhaps they might have borrowed the Canadian Tim Nutt’s line, which works as both a comic mea-culpa and apologia. “Yes I did say that,” Nutt added to an actually rather mild gag, “because I’m a comedian at a comedy show and there was an outside chance I was joking.” Humour, as Mark Twain put it, is tragedy plus time, which is why Karl Spain can make breezily funny remarks about the brutal efficiency of the German rail network or Neil Delamere can have wicked fun contrasting the literary output of Anne Frank and Elisabeth Fritzl without anyone hitting the roof.
Another equation for humour might be tastelessness minus reality. The deliciously funny Shappi Khorsandi, who was six-months pregnant when she performed at last year’s festival, returned to update us on motherhood: “Whatever happens, you have to keep the baby alive,” she told us with ironic understatement. “It’s really frowned upon if you don’t.” And Tim Nutt, a dead-ringer for a pudgier, even less well groomed Billy Connolly, illustrated the first rule of any comedian turning towards the dark side: know your audience. Moving from casual disdain towards idiots – “those people who clap when the airplane lands, I wonder if they boo when it crashes” – to making fun of just about anyone, he had a trouble-free run mocking the blind, the deaf and finally wheelchair-users for a Saturday performance, but found the temperature in the room drop on Sunday when a wheelchair-user started booing. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
ADAM HILLS, THE ebullient Australian comic who radiates positivity, gets to know his audience better than many, often drawing his best material straight from the front row. “What a lovely audience,” he said at the end of his set, which was no light ingratiation – almost everyone he addressed had a job with a charity organisation. Quizzing a young woman about her three-year relationship, in the prolonged absence of her boyfriend, Hills had lightning wits (“You work in a homeless shelter. I won’t ask where you met him.”) but got even edgier when the boyfriend returned. It all worked out – the boyfriend was a scream – but for a minute there the light nearly went out.
The British comedian Lee Mack less successfully hit a collision between compulsion and craft: exhibiting the comedian’s desire to be provocative, but uncertain how to make it funny. “I’m not a paedophile, I’m an Anglophile,” he said, pretending to have been misheard, “I only touch up fishermen’s kids”. Groan. “Half of you didn’t laugh because of the paedophilia association,” Lee continued, “and the other half don’t do puns.” For stand-up veterans, the latter causes more offence.
The annual Comics Football Match, in which Ireland takes on the Rest of The World, finally brought audiences out of the suffocating venues (14 years going and still no air conditioners) back into the sunshine. A supposedly light-hearted competition, the match is waged every year with an amusingly real seriousness, alleviated by Karl Spain and Fred McAuley’s dependably wry commentary. Every time Des Bishop touches the ball, the commentary flips into rudimentary Irish (“Árd sa speir,” intoned Spain, referring to either the kick or Bishop’s height), while Tommy Tiernan left the pitch to allow for Kevin Gildea’s substitution. “That’s the action of a man who doesn’t care about public opinion,” said McAuley, mischie-vously alert to Tiernan’s earlier hubbub. Public opinion was content with the score, though: Ireland 3 – ROTW 2.
Bringing Sunday’s line-up to a nostalgic finish, antique comedy restorers Barry Murphy, Ardal O’Hanlon and Kevin Gildea resuscitated their Mr Trellis sketch troupe, 20 years after their first bounding performances in the International Bar. An endearingly shambolic turn, at its best when displaying the fresh improvisatory skills of Gildea and guest Ian Coppinger, at its most trying when failing to blow the dust off its back catalogue, Mr Trellis’s goofy surrealism was at an indefinable point of the spectrum between light and dark, but prey to a sense of self-indulgence. This, to judge from the increased standard of heckling, may not be the best place to attempt underheated revival. Another guest, Fred McAuley, called out for cultural sobriquets for the male member. “Any advance on ‘dick’?” he asked.
“Two dicks!” came the response. Welcome to Kilkenny Cat Laughs, where everybody’s a comedian.
