Last One Laughing Ireland: Behind the scenes with Graham Norton and Aisling Bea on the new Irish comedy show

As forms of self-torture go, fits of laughter can be among the most debilitating. You’re in an environment where you’re not supposed to laugh and – precisely for that reason – every conceivable trigger pops into your brain. All efforts to avoid laughing then hit an in-built snag: it strikes you that your predicament is itself hilarious.

“Those are the best laughs, aren’t they? In really earnest situations. It’s agony, but it’s delicious agony,” says Graham Norton, host of LOL: Last One Laughing Ireland.

The Prime Video comedy series, which launches on the Amazon streaming service next week, gamifies the trick of resolutely not laughing, or even smiling, by locking 10 Irish comedians in a room and eliminating them from the competition in the order in which they crack.

“It turns out it’s also really delicious agony watching other people trying not to laugh. You see people and they’re just, ‘Arghhh’. Because they were tortured in there,” Norton says.

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The gig is a brilliant one for the cast, with the winner claiming the kudos of outlasting their peers plus €50,000 for their chosen charity. But the process of filming all six episodes on a single hot day in May has been intense.

The day after, still recovering on the lavish set at Font Hill Studios in Dublin, the seven cast members on media duties seem equal parts high and drained, with the postmortem covering such cheery topics as “breaking” (yourself and others), loss of humanity and coping mechanisms that include mild self-harm.

“Even, say, this top. I don’t know if I can wear this colour again, psychologically,” says Emma Doran.

“It’s a horrible show. We love it, but you’re told not to f**king smile. I would naturally smile at something, but then a lot of people smiled and they got a yellow card,” a “b****xed still” Jason Byrne laments.

“I was so worried that I was going to laugh just to make people like me,” says Tony Cantwell.

If not being able to laugh at others was hideous, as Deirdre O’Kane reports, so too was the nightmare of getting nothing back from their audience. (All bar the comedy actor Amy Huberman are stand-ups.)

“It’s like being a rookie comic dying on your arse again. Horrible. Desperate,” O’Kane says.

“Silly” was the tonal reference point cited ahead of filming by Kite Entertainment, the Irish production company commissioned by Prime. Norton says the recording featured “every type of comedy you can think of”, from dark to cerebral to surreal to slapstick. Several of the cast flag that first word – dark – and attribute this to a misery streak inherent to Irish humour.

“It did get very dark, didn’t it?” Doran says.

“It got so dark in three minutes,” says Paul Tylak.

“If they brought the Swedish ones” – from LOL: Last One Laughing Sweden – “in with us, I’d say they would have a nervous breakdown,” Byrne suggests.

How much of it will make the cut is also a recurring theme.

“I’d say the poor Amazon execs, especially the English ones and the Americans ones, must have been crawling under the table at some of the things we were saying. Needless to say, the Famine gets a shoutout,” Aisling Bea says.

“I’d say they were all ‘These people are f**king crazy,’ but it was kind of funny that they didn’t go, ‘No more Famine, guys.’ I’d say there’ll be a lot of stuff that doesn’t make it into the edit.”

Some of this verdict may be down to the presence of one individual.

“The only person I wondered would they be brave enough to cast him was David McSavage. I thought, ‘If they do, that will be very dangerous,’” says O’Kane.

[ Amy Huberman: ‘Power couple? I spend half the day just lying on the couch’ ]

[ David McSavage: ‘If I were a woman I’d be very f***ing angry’ ]

[ Graham Norton: ‘When my father died, I started to appreciate lots of Irish qualities that I’d dismissed’ ]

Cantwell adds that McSavage called him a hippy on Grafton Street the last time he saw him and was concerned “part two” might be coming.

“I was worried about David McSavage as well, just because I wasn’t sure if this show would be broadcastable,” says Martin Angolo.

Even for comedians whose affinities lie elsewhere, deploying the darkest of dark humour could have been tactically logical, as it is a sense that laughing is, on some level, inappropriate that so often leads people into the trap of trying to stifle their reaction.

In Steven Moffat’s noughties BBC sitcom Coupling, this is called “the giggle loop” and explained as a disaster that might happen during a minute’s silence. As soon as the thought occurs that the worst thing you can do is laugh, you almost do. You might control it, but because you can’t stop thinking about the near miss, it nearly happens again, only this time the laugh is bigger. The cycle repeats until “suddenly you’re in the middle of this completely silent room and your shoulders are going like you’re drilling the road”.

Of the cast, O’Kane is the one who readily owns up to uncontrollable laughter: “I’d be a great one for funeral laughing. I do a fair bit of funeral laughing. It’s a bit bad now.”

As a sufferer of acute and chronic laughter fits, I have some experience here. To borrow a Nortonism, let’s draw a veil over when and where. Crucially, each provocation has involved a co-conspirator who, though less afflicted, will have let slip they understood something was funny – even if that something was just me creasing up.

Unsurprisingly, then, the urgent need for distance from fellow cast members is a thread running through each international iteration of LOL. Almost every comic has a counterpart who is their personal Kryptonite, either because a prior connection and warmth between them elicit a contagion of mutual smirking or because they’re simply unable to sustain their defences against the other person’s comedy weapons. This is an entertainment show with predators.

“I felt like Jason could smell blood all the time. He was following me around with a fart machine for so long, I was on the cusp of breaking,” says Cantwell.

“My tactic at the start was to hunt down the strongest. I went for Dave, and it just wasn’t going to work. He could still be in there now,” says Byrne.

“Catherine [Bohart] hounded me. She haunted me. ‘What do you think of this, Paul? What do you think of that, Paul? Is this faraway or small, Paul?’ I was, like, ‘What is going on here?’” says Tylak.

Byrne admits to “needing to get away” from Tylak’s poetry readings.

“That was to help people. You’re not supposed to laugh at serious poetry,” Tylak says.

“That’s why it was f**king funny. His book was like a gun,” says Byrne.

“Aisling Bea, though, as well, mother of f***, that was a nightmare. She asked me to smell her sausages, and I thought I was going to f**king lose it.”

Bea says she was hoping to break the others but was conscious that her excitement about doing a joke could prove her own comedy trapdoor: “The first thing I did, I found it funny myself, which is a terribly arrogant state to be in.”

So did you trip up by laughing at your own material?

“I did accidentally smile while doing something, but I still want a stewards’ inquiry, because I feel like I smiled as a character, not as Aisling. I was a master of my own downfall.”

O’Kane describes the risk of laughing at herself as her “biggest fear”, while Cantwell says “the smug satisfaction of finishing a bit” made him fret.

“It’s a real thing. The anticipation of it,” Doran says.

The suppression techniques used were as eclectic as the comedy. Bea seized on the set’s giant knitting needles and balls of wool. O’Kane tried “the fishface thing”. Cantwell became “a different character” to deflect the onset of laughter.

“That was the only way I felt I could do it, just by being a dry shite.”

Doran and Tylak gasp as Byrne reveals a bruise from where he pinched his arm to stop himself laughing.

“Someone said to clench your buttocks,” says Tylak.

“You clenched mine, didn’t you?” says Byrne.

An instinctive talent for maintaining a deadpan, stony-faced facade was perhaps the best protection: “Everyone was, like, ‘You’re going to be hard to break,’ and I thought, ‘Do I seem miserable?’” says a confused Angolo.

With all this comedy warfare erupting, it isn’t hard to see why Norton declares that his is “the easy job”. Installed in “the best seat in the house” in the adjacent host’s room, his task is to watch the proceedings unfold, hit the buzzer whenever an infringement is captured on one of the 44 cameras, then enter the cast room wielding either a red or a yellow card.

“I don’t think there is anything like this,” Norton says of LOL, which has the distinction of being both Prime’s first original series in Ireland and his first Irish show in decades.

“On paper, you think people in a room trying not to laugh, that won’t be funny, that sounds quite dry. But, weirdly, it is very funny. In my room, there was a lot of laughing the whole day.”

The show, recorded the week after he co-presented the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool, was a chance to come home to Ireland.

“Also, I just knew it was going to be an amazing cast of Irish comics – it was a pleasure to spend time watching them,” he says.

“Because it’s done in real time, I thought, ‘Oh, there will be lulls and an hour will go by and it’ll just be people drinking tea.’ That never happened. It was 10 comics who were just on it, all working, from the minute I pressed the green button. I’m in awe of them.”

If he had been asked to compete on a show like this back when he was a young Irish comic, he would have said yes but not fancied his chances.

“I would have been so bad at it, I would have been terrible, because whatever it is that those comics have where they’re able to just take that deep breath and go, right, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it to silence, I don’t think I ever had that.”

What is certain is that Norton’s involvement elevated the status of the series from the outset, guaranteeing that Kite could secure its casting wishlist.

“I spend my life ringing people to take part in Irish TV shows, and sometimes that’s a hard sell. When you’re ringing going, ‘Graham Norton’s hosting,’ you get called back,” says Darren Smith, Kite’s managing director.

He and his Kite colleagues “had to kind of reprogramme ourselves” working with Amazon.

“Up until Harjeet” – Chhokar, an Amazon Studios executive – “emailed me, over a year ago, I didn’t think global streamers cold-called Irish indies. I genuinely thought it was a wind-up at first.”

Likewise, when Amazon proposed Norton, Smith says he initially thought, “Oh yeah, you’ll be f**king lucky.”

On a tour of the Claire Morrissey-designed set, talk turns to the innate Irishness of this version of the format, which features celebrity cameos – “comedy hand grenades” – such as Anne Doyle transforming the lyrics of Aon Focal Eile into a news-bulletin script.

Chhokar says that Irish comedy “travels everywhere” and this series will, too, but stresses that Amazon is making it for its Irish Prime Video subscribers.

“It’s a great opportunity for the comics who are only known in Ireland. Someone is going to break out of this show, at least in the UK, if not further afield,” says Smith.

Who does he think it might be?

“I love all my children equally.”

The cast says they were sad whenever someone was red-carded – “I felt like I was at Dublin Airport departures at Christmas,” says Bea – but the joy of an elimination is that the rules are paused, offering the chance for “a beautiful release”, as Byrne puts it.

“It was such a relief to laugh again. To just know you’re human,” says Cantwell.

“Because you kind of think, ‘Is this what we are now? Have we turned? Have we evolved into these horrible beings, and will we ever go back?’”

Then the green light comes on again and the game resumes, Angolo says with a sigh.

“You tell yourself, ‘I’m now dead inside.’”

LOL: Last One Laughing Ireland is available on Prime Video from Friday, January 19th