Like 'kids who say the things they shouldn't and then laugh', comedy is a way of taking power, Kevin Gildea tells Stephen Dixon.
With a slight shudder, Kevin Gildea recalls the time when he emerged from the darkness and tried to reinvent himself as a cuddly comic.
"There was something pure about the darkness, but I cut it with a bit of light when I went to England," he says. "I was becoming a product, even though I didn't realise it. It wasn't really a compromise, but I was trying to communicate with an audience without alienating them. But if you're doing the dark stuff you have to be always true to yourself, because audiences respond to an authenticity on stage."
There's that dank and lonely place you go to when you wake in the middle of the night, wracked with doubt and self-recrimination; there's another place, where you drink the bitter dregs of hungover remorse. With luck, we visit these places rarely and briefly. But they are the places where Gildea finds much of his inspiration. Unusual territory for a funnyman.
He has long been one of Ireland's odder comedians. In the late 1980s, when he was part of Mr Trellis with Ardal O'Hanlon and Barry Murphy, founding the Comedy Cellar at Dublin's International Bar and helping to put Irish comedy on the map, his melancholy cynicism set him slightly apart from the others.
Not that he isn't often very funny - no one has a better way with a crisp one-liner - but there was always that strangeness.
"Here's some good advice," one of his old routines went. "Never have sex with your best friend, because it's always a mistake. I did that last week. The next morning I was so embarrassed. I thought: 'Oh no, I've had sex with my best friend!' I couldn't look at him. I couldn't talk to him. I couldn't feed him. I couldn't bring him for walks . . ."
More recently he has found an ideal form for his bittersweet approach in musical collaboration with guitarist Sean Millar and drummer Paul Cantwell in The Kevin Gildeas. To Millar's limpid background noodling, Gildea delivers his bleak humour in a style that isn't quite poetry, isn't quite rap. They're doing a series of Dublin gigs, starting tomorrow, and a very funny version of Gildea's best monologue, No No No, is the short film that accompanies the new Irish thriller, Dead Bodies, when it goes on general release at the end of this month.
The sudden burst of activity is completed by the release of a CD, Hot Comedy and Cool Beats.
"What's interesting creative-wise is that Sean and Paul take care of the music side of things in the main," says Gildea. "I can write something and go to them and they'll put music to it, but equally they can come up with something and I'll mess around with it. It excites me as much as the stuff I did when I was starting out with Trellis. I feel privileged, because I've gone through periods when I think, 'Jesus, I've been doing this for so long', and that's because I wasn't taking responsibility for pushing things as far as they would go - I would write stuff, but I wouldn't actually perform it on stage.
"Sometimes you write stuff that you are not in a position to perform. I remember writing things for The Kevin Gildeas three years ago. Up to two years before Sean even mentioned putting comedy to music I used to sit down in England and stay up writing till four in the morning, and then I'd look at it and think: 'Why did I write that?' Because I couldn't use it in my stand-up. It was only a couple of years later, when I started working with Sean, that I could perform that material."
While O'Hanlon became a huge television comedy star in Britain and Murphy built a fine career here, especially as part of the Après Match team, Gildea moved to England and gigged around the clubs in a more low-key way. Two years ago he moved back to Ireland.
"I still play the English clubs, but not as much - once a month, or maybe three times every two months, and the rest of the time I spend here with the band or at home writing or worrying about what I'm going to do," he says. "It was time to come home before I was a 50-year-old man in a pub in Kilburn dreaming about a farm in a country that doesn't exist any more."
He teases audiences and has always been interested in how far he can provoke them.
"I used to do this stuff about the car ads, the drink-driving ads," he says. "Now I'm all for trying to stop people driving when they're drunk, but I was taking the piss out of the way that the ads emotionally hit you over the head. I did a routine about it in Killarney and I was really doing a good gig and when I mentioned it I just lost the audience because they were disgusted.
"But I was doing jokes about what at the end of the day was not drink-driving accidents, but drink-driving actors in ads. I don't mind the manipulation, but I like to take the piss out of the big lingering looks at the end at these people whose lives you have messed up, and the big eyes on them and the big sad heads on them. You just think: 'Look at you, you bad actor!'
"But people in Killarney thought I was saying drink-driving is good and more people should be killed."
The story demonstrates Gildea's strength and weakness as a stand-up: a kind of unfocused integrity aimed at the most unlikely targets. He has great courage, but doesn't use it to mock the folly of drink-driving but something peripheral to it. In some ways, he is like the schoolboy who wants to show you a dead rat behind the bike shed, or Dickens's Fat Boy, drawing you aside to tell you a tale "that will make your flesh creep".
The material he has been delivering with The Kevin Gildeas for the past year or so shines a little light into that darkness. The humour comes from loss, rejection, emotional pain, men's and women's expectations of each other and the disillusion so often involved, but the tone is mostly sweetly and funnily sad. It's a slick and classy act, evoking rueful smiles of recognition rather than belly laughs, and has moved his comedy forward in unusual and risky ways.
"I try to look at dynamics that create situations rather than the specifics of the situations themselves," he says. "Basically, I can only write what I think is funny, and some of that is a bit dark. If you look around at the world there is quite a lot of darkness and anger. Sometimes you can look at what is going on and you can feel quite powerless and despairing. And there is a great sense of power in being able to laugh at that. Being able to identify it, look at it and laugh at it is like raising a flag of the human spirit over it.
"Think about kids saying the things they shouldn't and then laughing at it - there's an element of that in what I do. Humour is where you can say the things that can't be said in another place. You have to trust the comic on stage."
Kevin Gildea flashes one of those bitter, self-mocking grins: "I think I'm a good person," he says. "Please like me."
The Kevin Gildeas play Whelan's Sunday (with special guest Barry Murphy as Gunther), April 13th and April 20th. The short, No No No, goes on nationwide release with Dead Bodies on April 25th, and the CD, Hot Comedy and Cool Beats, will be released next month