Not knowing any Irish made Des Bishop feel like an outsider, so the comedian has gone back to school - in the Connemara Gaeltacht - and is making a TV series about the experience. He expects to end up with more than just a cúpla focal, he tells Davin O'Dwyer.
If there is an archetypal Des Bishop joke, it's the one about Ireland's complicated relationship with the humble immersion heater. Nobody had acknowledged the national obsession with the flicky switches in the hot press until the hyperactive New Yorker came up with a routine on the subject. The Bishop formula was created: the outsider observes a peculiar Irish idiosyncrasy, then crafts a monologue of sustained humour, and we laugh at the insight and punchline. He is an amped-up David Attenborough, and we are both the wildlife and the viewer. A beautiful relationship is born.
For his latest project, however, Bishop has swapped immersion heating for immersion learning, moving to Connemara for a year to learn Irish and film a documentary series called In the Name of the Fada for RTÉ, in the spirit of his previous shows The Des Bishop Work Experience and Joy in the Hood. In terms of observing a culture, this is method comedy at its most dedicated.
"I was exempt from Irish at school," says Bishop, explaining how St Peter's College in Wexford, which he attended from the age of 14, denied the young native of Queens the joy of studying Peig Sayers and Gabriel Rosenstock. "I was exceptionally aware of Irish, but I just knew that everyone hated it. So now I don't have that baggage with the language that everyone else has. I never thought I would care, because I didn't think I would stay in Ireland after school, but that's the way it happened."
Inevitably less frenetic in person than on stage, he is still a rapid-fire talker, quickly composing points and arguments that build like a joke reaching towards its climax. He doesn't use mere sentences; he speaks emphatically in paragraphs about our peculiar relationship with the Irish language.
"I felt excluded, because I never had that Irish-college experience, that rite of passage," he says. "Comedians have entire routines based on that, and I never got it. I thought I knew everything about Ireland, yet there's this Irish-speaking culture that's been here the whole time I've been here, and I know nothing about it. As someone who claims to be an observer of Irish society, it's a pretty big hole if you know nothing about this Irish-speaking culture."
A year in Lettermore, in Co Galway, should make up for that - by the end of his time there he hopes to conduct an entire gig in Irish. He even got to experience those formative few weeks at Irish college.
"I went to Coláiste Lurgan with the kids, and the least amount of time those kids had been studying the language was nine to 10 years. I'd been learning Irish for four months at that stage, and under no circumstances was I the weakest in my class. I mean, I wouldn't have been thrown out for speaking English. I think that's absolutely crazy. I can spend days without speaking English - if the whole world collapsed tomorrow, and the Gaeltacht was all that was left, I could survive. It's just taught so badly. And people keep those negative emotions. I've done a few gigs with this material, and I got some aggressive heckles I've never got before, like 'Enough of the f***ing Irish', like it was worse than talking about abortion or something."
Who but Bishop could tackle our dysfunctional relationship with our language? But Bishop's unique position is fuel to the inevitable sceptics, who may think this will be more of the "Yank in Ireland" material he made his name with, an accusation he is all too aware of.
"One of the common things people say to me is, 'If you've been living here so long, why do you still have an accent?' " he says. "I don't quite know how I identify myself. I think I'm Irish now in everything but my accent, really. My life is here. I could make an observation, about Irish Mass, for instance, and that joke would be just as funny if I'm Des O'Hare - my mother's last name - from Co Down, but because I say it, people say that's an outsider's point of view.
"My last DVD was about disadvantaged communities in Ireland, it wasn't about an American's opinions of disadvantaged communities. At the end of the day, though, you're just writing jokes - it still has to be funny."
That last project, the TV series Joy in the Hood and the live show and the DVD Fitting In, saw Bishop conduct a series of comedy workshops in disadvantaged communities throughout Ireland, from Ballymun to Southill to the Travellers of Tuam.
This social-engagement is typical of Bishop; it was first seen in The Des Bishop Work Experience, a televised version of Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed with extra jokes and curry chips. It's fair to say that he's not content merely to do the rounds of the comedy-panel game shows - his infrequently updated blog even includes a link to Noam Chomsky's website.
"When I started doing comedy and becoming aware of issues, I was watching Michael Moore, Mark Thomas and Bill Hicks, and I got quite influenced by that stuff. I remember aspiring to make documentaries about stuff I really believed in, where I could be the guy who breaks the big story. But by the time I made Work Experience I realised that, unlike, say, Mark Thomas, I'm more of a comedian than an activist.
"I can quite happily go on Marian Finucane or Questions and Answers and blast off about disadvantaged communities and alcoholism and issues I believe strongly about, but on something like minimum wage I could only give you my experience of that, rather than detailed policy. I mean, a huge percentage of the Joy in the Hood participants have gone on to do something with comedy - about 40 per cent out of just 19 in the Republic," he says. "Think of what percentage of people from those communities are actually represented in mainstream Irish society. I can't think of too many."
For such a left-leaning, socially engaged performer, it's notable that his material doesn't deal to any real extent with his homeland, currently such a fertile ground for comedians looking for material. "I just stopped making Bush jokes," he says, "more because I lost interest myself. It gets a bit boring, frankly, but also because I started getting a certain type of laugh which I hated, which is what I call the anti-American whoop. Which in a way is a bit of a paradox, because the one time Irish or Europeans whoop like Americans is when you take the piss out of George Bush. It became the go-to opinion, but it's so much more complex, and it just becomes a cheap gag."
Bishop's new live show, Tongues, opening in mid-September, tackles enough big topics to easily avoid having to dip into glib anti-Americanism. "The Irish word for language is teanga, tongue, and while the first half of the show is about living in the Gaeltacht, the second half is about speaking in tongues, miscommunication, born-again Christians, intelligent design and the journey of my faith, starting as an altar boy."
It is Bishop's other journey, though, from immersion heaters to immersion learning, that marks his true development as a comedian and an Irishman. After all the comments about his Noo Yawk accent, he's finally fitting in. "I'll admit it," he says. "I speak Irish with an Irish accent." u
Tongues is at Vicar Street, Dublin, September 13th-16th and 27th-29th; INEC, Killarney, Co Kerry, October 26th; TF Royal Theatre, Castlebar, Co Mayo, October 27th; and Cork Opera House, November 26th and 27th. In the Name of the Fada is on RTÉ next March