COMEDY: How do Irish and American senses of humour differ? Comedian Dara O'Briain looks for laughs in a city 'enveloped in sadness' where the one-liner reigns
Even before you get to New York, you can sense people being over-sensitive. Prior to appearing there for this year's Irish comedy festival, I was e-mailed some questions from one of the Irish papers there for an interview. It was the usual guff about "Wheres" and "How longs" and "How much are you looking forward to. . . " and then right in the middle of them all: "How will it feel to perform in a city which is 'Enveloped in Complete Sadness'?" I mean, Jesus, if I wasn't nervous before. . . .
While New York is certainly going through very public grief, it isn't enveloped in sadness. It is wrapped in flags, though; with one notable exception, they are everywhere to be seen. Even on arrival at JFK airport, where the roads signs to Manhattan are a silhouette of the most famous skyline of the world, the twin towers haven't been removed. They've just been covered over with a sticker of the Stars and Stripes.
Mind you, when comedian Des Bishop, on-stage at Rory Dolan's in Yonkers, accidentally stumbled into the US flag during his set and chided himself himself by shouting: "Don't touch the flag, boy", the audience roared with laughter. He then picked up the Irish flag and mounted it on top of the US one, to graphically demonstrate the beautiful love of his Irish father and American mother. The crowd roared louder, mainly because the Bishop parents were sitting in the front row, along with 60 other friends and family. "I didn't think you'd love the dirty ones, Auntie Pegg," said Des, mildly shocked.
This was the second year of Witty Fest, the New York Irish comedy festival. Organised by Tracey Ferguson, an Irish native who has been living in New York for six years, the aim is to bring the best of Irish comedy to the Big Apple. The shows are at predominantly Irish venues, such as the one in Yonkers - where the illegal immigrant still roams free - with the odd guerrilla raid on the real US comedy clubs. Last year, the inaugural festival brought over Tommy Tiernan and Ardal O'Hanlon.
Building on that success, this year the festival made inroads into mainstream New York. There were mentions in New York Daily News and a pick of the week in Time Out, with special mention for Michael Mee - "Woody Allen with a Cork accent". Although for balance, it's worth noting that the listing also said "Mee, Jason Byrne, Colin Murphy, Des Bishop, Dave O'Doherty and Dara O'Briain. Yeah, we've never heard of any of them either."
We did get our faces broadcast across Times Square, though. HSBC has a charming service whereby you can have your face digitally added to a cartoon, which is then shown on a screen on the side of a bus. Giddy like children, myself, Colin and Jason ran in, gurned to the camera and were told that we would be on show in six minutes; 10 seconds later we were outside, and impatiently jumping up and down waiting for the big moment. It was only when the cartoons arrived we realised that, funny as they were, they were all ads and we had just signed up to advertise HSBC financial services for free. The deflowering of three more commercial virgins.
The shows themselves? Like ex-pat shows the world over, the audience were out to hear about the old country, not the new world. There were a few comedy tourists in to see the foreigners, but it was mainly Paddies. In fact, given that I work in London now, I had the unusual task of re-Paddying up my material to suit the audience. A few mentions of rashers here, the odd reference to Lent there. I'm a whore, so sue me.
As for the big issue, we mainly avoided it. For my own part, it was a combination of not wanting to step into mawkish sentiment or not wanting to be glibly offensive. Colin Murphy took a more robust attitude. "I'm not going home thinking I didn't have the balls," he declared, before launching into an attack on George Dubya. "The man cannot eat a pretzel. This country is being run by Homer Simpson." He also took on the stringent security checks enforced all over New York, like those at the Empire State building. "Who's going to hijack a building? Take me to Cuba." For the record, the audience loved it.
The first person to start making jokes again in New York was David Letterman, whose Late Show is based here. I went to a recording of the show with Eddie Brill, who books the stand-ups for Letterman, and who has been the warm-up man for the last five years.
On the Monday after September 11th he was the first one to walk out in front of the audience. "We weren't sure if we were gong to come back right away. It was Dave's decision ultimately," explained Brill. "It was hard to get an audience first of all. I'm not sure how they did it. I'm sure they pulled them off the street. People were pretty much still in shock. The mood was pretty bizarre. I mean, we had camera crews around the studio asking, what was it like to do a show? So the show itself was an event. I was interviewed by the press - what are you going to do?; what are you going to say?; I said I'm going to be honest with the crowd and explain what we're going through. There's no way to go up there and act like everything's okay.
"I explained what was going to happen, or as much as I knew. I wasn't aware that they were going to start without the theme music. There was no monologue, it just opened with a Dave sitting at the desk. And the show started there.
"When I first walked out to talk to the crowd I looked into their faces and I just realised, they didn't know what to do. So I explained to them, it was ok to laugh, that the people who had passed on would probably want them to laugh, and that little by little we were all going to have to get through this."
The first guest was Dan Rather, the CBS news anchor who had been on air throughout the previous week. "Dan broke down and apologised, and Dave said: 'Christ, you're a human being', and Dan broke down again. But even during Dan's interview, Dave would do some kidding around, just asking some silly questions to get people to laugh again. "There would be serious poignant questions, and then he would ask: 'So why is this guy Bin Laden so angry? What's the matter? Does he not get cable or something?' The first laughs were really important. It wasn't easy to do what Dave did. I tell you one thing, I was never more proud to be part of the Letterman show as I was that night."
Later in the week I went to visit Ground Zero with Colin and Jason. Ground Zero is New York's number one tourist attraction, although one decried by many New Yorkers. Not least because there was no separate viewing platform for relatives of the victims. They have to stand and queue with tourists like us, who, let's face it, have come to gape.
There is no hazy after-image of the towers at Ground Zero. There is no guide to the eye as to how plainly huge they were; no dotted outline in the sky of how high they went; how purely vertiginous they used to be. And while the rest of the city, from every second window to the light show on the Empire State Building, is draped in patriotic red, white and blue, Ground Zero has no flag, no eagle and no twisted metal superstructure as monument.
During the gigs, we had a book running over who would have the first 9-11 moment. You know: "What do you so for a living?" "I'm a fireman" "Eeek". That never happened, although we did meet a member of the NYPD. Mind you, we were so impressed that he had a gun (hidden in his sock!) that we forgot to be all respectful. There was a woman who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald in the front row at a gig in the Playwright, just off Broadway at Times Square. (You didn't need to know where the Playwright was, but I loved writing that whole address. In fact, we mentioned being on Broadway so often during the show that people came up afterwards to tell us Broadway was 20 miles long and that there is little enough of Manhattan which isn't on Broadway. Thanks. I'm living the dream here, lads.)
Anyway, my only interaction with the lady from Cantor Fitzgerald was to watch a glob of spit arc out of my mouth during a punchline, and slowly parabola on to her forehead. She was quite gracious about it afterwards. And like about 50 per cent of the Americans at the shows, she seemed to get it.
US stand-up comedy is very different from the world I work in. To illustrate: Johnny Carson, the legendary host of the Tonight Show, once went to check out the next generation when they were still in the clubs. It was a night when both Letterman and Jay Leno were performing; the two men who would fight it out to take Carson's chair when he retired. Both were at the top of their games, rocking the room with half-hour shows. As he left, Carson was asked what he thought. "They're both very good," he judged, "but neither of them have six minutes." You don't even get six minutes these days. The stand-up slot on Letterman is four-and-a-half minutes long.
And even if you've been telling jokes for a decade, you won't be given a chance to mess it up. Eddie Brill makes sure of that. In the week of your appearance, Brill brings you from club to club, watching you do your four-and-a half-minute show over and over, until it's word perfect. The key word is "tight". A guaranteed laugh on every line. A set number of laughs per minute. No American comic would gamble a Letterman slot on telling a story. Or chatting to the crowd. And since that slot is the Holy Grail for American comics, it looms large over the writing they do. Give them a funny idea and they'll try to write the neatest, sparsest, tightest one-liner about it. Three clauses and a laugh. And on to the next idea.
Give Irish comics a funny idea and they'll try to ride it all the way to Cork; they'll tell you what they thought of before the idea, during the idea and for an hour or two afterwards. It's not that we don't have great one-liner merchants, but it isn't the dominant style. As Colin Murphy put it: "We're punk, they're The Eagles." Of course, he was wearing a CBGB t-shirt at the time.
After the Irish gigs, myself and Michael Mee hung around to do a show in Lower East Side at a club called the Luna Lounge. Roseanne Barr had appeared there the previous week, and hovering at the back were a number of well-regarded US stand-ups. It seemed as good a place as any to see a culture clash. And hey presto! Act after act did seven minutes of one-liners. Admittedly, so did Michael, but then he is "Woody Allen with a Cork Accent". (© Time Out New York, 2002).
It was a new material night, and it would unfair to review the gags, but it was noticeable that no-one spoke to the audience. Years of seven-minute slots had focused them too much, I felt. Time to blow the cobwebs out of the place. I went on last and started roaring at them. "I'm Irish and I'll be pausing less than the rest of the acts tonight. How's it goin' sir?" I bellowed at a bloke in the front. He looked petrified. They all looked petrified.
I've done strange shows before. In the Netherlands, for example, where the crowd were all locals. I could feel them translating everything into Dutch. A brief pause and then a polite laugh. This New York show was like that. They liked a lot of it, but it was a smiley-like rather than a laugh-out-loud like. Every so often they would laugh at the wrong moment, and then, 15 seconds later you'd hit them with a big punch-line and bang! Nothing. At times it was like doing a show on a delayed satellite link. I survived it, but they didn't walk away going: "Jesus, we've been doing this wrong all these years". They probably walked away going: "Thank God the Irishman has stopped shouting at me".
The final show of Witty Fest 2002 was a sold-out showcase in Boston. There was hardly an American in the place. As David O'Doherty put it: "It's like being in Ballaghadrreen on a Thursday night." All the Irish kept saying hello to me because Don't Feed the Gondolas is shown every day there on Celtic television. Not the latest editions; the ones from 1998. An audience reared on topical Irish comedy from the late 1990s, in a city I lived in on a J1 visa in 1992. I opened with a joke about rashers, Lent and Tayto crisps.
It was good to be home.
Dara O'Briain performs at the Shelter, Vicar St, Dublin, tonight, and tours Ireland until the end of the month