It's one thing for a comedian to be funny in a club but quite another to make the leap to TV, Dara O'Briain and Jo Brand tell Richard Gillis
There has never been a better time to be funny. As media channels multiply, so do the outlets for wit, satire and general off-the-cuff quippery. For the big names of the comedy circuit here and in the UK, such as Tommy Tiernan, Dylan Moran and Dara O'Briain, there is a very good living to be made from regular TV and film work, married to their live stage acts, sitcoms, DVDs, podcasts and radio shows. But with the high profile comes the need for material - and lots of it. Television appearances consume hours of a comic's best work. And once a routine has been aired at prime time, it reaches the end of its useful life.
"The big problem is if you get on TV too quickly in your career and you don't have enough stuff," says O'Briain, one of Ireland's most successful funnymen, who started his career on children's TV, with Echo Island, before making his name as host of The Panel and, in the UK, on Have I Got News for You. The rules are clear, says O'Briain: you just have to be funny.
There is a school of thought that suggests jokes are dying - or at least have gone out of fashion. Go to any of the huge number of comedy nights in pubs and clubs across Ireland in any given week and you'll hear very few traditional jokes, with their set-up and punchline format. In their place is hour upon hour taken from the performers' experiences, habits, views on sex and marriage, and anything else they can come up with to fill their 20-minute spots.
"The idea of three men walking into a bar has been cut down, because we don't need the contrived context, but the jokes are still being used," says O'Briain. "What has happened is that there has been a change in the construction of the joke. We have got rid of the first two men and taken what happened to the third one and made it apply to the individual comic concerned. People became bored of hearing the same set-ups, but the funny bit of the joke is still used."
Being funny on television brings with it particular discipline, says O'Briain, a veteran of the chat-show circuit. "Laughter comes from a release of tension, and you can manipulate that feeling with a live crowd; you can create a more complex narrative," he says. "On TV the presentation of the material comes to the fore, and things tend to get pared back to the basic gag. It's a cold medium in that sense, and it is more difficult for a comedian's real personality to come through."
The best comedians are the ones who appear to be telling a joke or funny story for the first time. The process is often far from spontaneous, however.
"When I'm writing with other people for television, ideas tend to get bounced around between several people," says Marcus Brigstocke, host of the BBC's The Now Show and The Late Edition. "A comedic conceit gets tossed in the air. In a good writers' room, when everyone is working on the same side you see how long you can keep it going. Afterwards it needs someone to say 'he said that', but it only works if we get to it a certain way. It doesn't work if someone in the room keeps shouting: 'Ooh, write it down.' "
Brigstocke suggests that spontaneity is critical to getting a laugh. Between the conception of a joke and its appearance on TV, some of the magic is lost.
"Have I Got News for You has the best writers in the UK working on it every week," says Brigstocke. "Sometimes they get brilliant hosts who can really deliver a joke. But the jokes are only half as funny as a little moment that happens between Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, because that's real. It is the sort of thing that happens in the writers' room, but if you were to attempt to re-create the moment, it falls apart."
Material for TV also goes through an editor and a lawyer. "The lawyer usually sends my stuff back with the most fatuous, pointless suggestions," says Brigstocke. "I think of lawyers sitting in a darkened room covered in dust. They get a news script and a comedy script in the same envelope and don't know the difference."
The opportunities presented to comedians on television have become too formulaic, according to Jo Brand, who made her first appearance on Friday Night Live in the mid-1980s. "As a stand-up you are presented with a number of formats," says Brand. "People are saying that straight stand-up doesn't work on TV any more. But Jack Dee Live at the Apollo shows that you can still do quite long pieces successfully."
She laments the absence of genuine spontaneity. "I keep meaning to ask Frank Skinner and David Baddiel whether they prepared anything for their show Unplanned [where the two comedians responded to questions from a live audience]. I suspect they had a safety net of stuff to shove in if it was going pear-shaped."
The rough edges, so much a part of the live experience, are missing from much television comedy. "What you don't pick up in the nature of a live performance is the bits that go wrong, people dying," she says. "It may not be traditionally funny, but it would be very interesting to have some way of capturing it on TV."
As for content, a set containing bad language is less of an issue for television executives than perceived bad taste. "If you are doing a panel show it depends very much on who the producer is. Some will demand to see the material verbatim for each section of the show. Others are more relaxed and trust your comedy judgment. Often it is given back to you like homework, with red lines and 'No way!' written in the margin."
Brand has noticed that the red pen is increasingly drawn to religious material. "I had a routine for Channel 4 about a Muslim woman stand-up. I was dressed in the full burka and did a lot of silly jokes, like 'Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I'm a pair of curtains, and the doctor says 'I'm not surprised, dressed like that.' Channel 4 wouldn't let me do that, because they thought they might be blown up."
She has little time for critics who say that jokes have gone out of fashion, preferring to think that television producers tend to deselect performers of more traditional material. "There are a lot of people doing one-liners and good sharp material, but they are just not getting on the TV as much," says Brand. "Of course, there's Jimmy Carr. He is a pure set-up-and-punchline merchant, and he seems very popular."
She says the schedules continue to offer chances for stand-ups to show a different side to their personality. Brand was helped when returning to TV after having children by doing What Not to Wear on the Red Carpet, Fame Academy and Play It Again. "It was an opportunity to muck about and let people see that I wasn't the hideous, homicidal radical feminist they thought I was."
For their American counterparts, the route to stardom is often through situation comedy. Jerry Seinfeld, Drew Carey, Larry David and Roseanne Barr are just a few of the big-hitters who made that transition.
"I don't want to do a sitcom," says O'Briain. "It is very much an American style of working to use stand-ups to create recognisable characters that can be slotted into a sitcom format. There are commissioning editors cruising the comedy clubs in LA, saying: 'He would be great for the role of third kooky friend.' You have to remember that there is a huge film and TV factory in the same town. When you are there you get a slightly disappointing sense of 'Oh, this is why there are so many film and TV programmes set in LA.' It is not because it is more interesting than, say, Baltimore; it is because this is where the cameras are."
Such tactics are familiar to regular TV viewers, according to O'Briain. "I was at the school in Dublin where RTÉ would always go on exam-results day. Every year the same school - we were the most famous kids in Ireland." There may be enough material there for a whole new routine.