When did the comedian appear? When did the first man - and in those days it was, emphatically, a man - get up on a stage and entertain people by talking to them? Dickens was a pretty thorough-going observer of English life, and he never mentioned "comedians".
The OED admits the usage as entertainer only in the late 19th century - which places the term firmly around the emergence of the English music hall or American vaudeville.
Humour is hardly about individual entertainment. Rather, it's a probe into the larger mind of a community, into its sensitivities and its strengths. A joke which only one member of the audience laughs at is a disaster. And for years, Irish stage-humour was limited in its subject matter, and even more limited in its ability to tackle national taboos.
Jimmy O'Dea is affectionately remembered within the folklore of Dublin, largely because the ghastly reality of his "humour" has been forgotten: one of his routines in 1940 consisted of a hilarious little skit about what would happen to Ireland's Jews if Mr Hitler arrived. Oh, very funny indeed. And for the most part, Irish comedy acts stuck to the old show-business tradition of telling scripted jokes.
The modern idea of a stand-up comic - somehow, that word edged alongside and displaced "comedian" - is a Jewish-American invention, pioneered by Lennie Bruce. It was less dependent on jokes than on reflections on life, often improvised. The form spread to Britain, where, with Billy Connolly in the vanguard, it took off over 20 years ago. Incredibly, in those days it was assumed that a stand-up comic was, by definition, male.
Actually, the issue wasn't gender but self-confidence - that of both the performer, risking all in an improvised patter, and the audience, which had to feel at ease hearing sacred cows being publicly and ruthlessly sacrificed. Perhaps this was why Ireland for so long had no stand-up comedians. Indeed, our national psyche was crippled by an almost pathological insecurity, which expressed itself in dismal outrages like the Abbey riots and the ruthless suppression of The Taylor and Ansty. This insecurity is with us still: hence even the most drunken social gatherings conclude with an almost ludicrously fervent rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann, policed by local buffoons and small-town bullies.
Yet Irish comedy managed to change in the late 1980s. An entire generation of Irish male stand-up comics suddenly blossomed like the desert after rain. Sean Hughes, Dylan Moran, Ardal O'Hanlon, D'Unbelievables brought Irish voices and expressions to an American-Jewish form of entertainment. As important as them was the emergence of an audience which had enough backbone to listen to Irish institutions being lampooned. The key to this success was self-confidence - so much so that you can chart the emergence of Irish comedy acts with the birth of that clichéd creature, the feline Gael.
The next stage in the evolution of the stand-up comic in Ireland was for it to leap sexes, which in due course it did. But there still aren't as many women comedians as men. One of them is Anne Lillis, whose mind is a scandalous shopping mall of anarchy, subversion and lewdness. This she-Soho on legs is the power behind the The Fallen Angels cabaret which starts at the Focus theatre, Pembroke Lane, Dublin on Sunday (doors open at 7.30, performance at 8.30; wine bar).
It's somehow comforting that the next stage of women moving into what had been almost male monopolies should be at The Focus: for it was here, of course, that the great pre-feminist proto-pioneer, Deirdre O'Connell, ran her Stanislavksi classes. It was a classically Irish exercise in gracelessness that when Deirdre was alive, she was seldom praised, but once she had been called to the Green Room Above a couple of years ago, she suddenly became something of a heroine of Dublin life.
And rightly so, even though belatedly. She had come from America to a Dublin in which the Abbey was almost the theatrical arm of Fianna Fáil, in ghastly and abject thrall to the men of 1916, and the Gate was a winsome, perfumed ruin. It took iron certainty, resolve and courage to break the stranglehold of the grey mediocrities upon Irish theatre - and Deirdre had those qualities, and more.
Anne trained under Deirdre, and possesses some of her steel: Stanislavski meets Bessemer. She was found to have a brain tumour six years ago, and since brains and tumours seldom co-exist within the same skull without serious consequences for the former, the visitor had to go; but eviction can be nearly as problematical as allowing the uninvited intruder to remain. Four years of her life went into recovering - fully - from the surgeon's knife, and now she is back at her career as a drama teacher, singer, comedian and theatrical producer of The Fallen Angels. The saga has been a blessing of a sort, for, being a comedian, Anne has turned that episode to mordantly good account in her comedy material.
For the next six Sundays the dear old Focus will be home to a crack in the hard core over the hot and bubbling lava of comic talent that lies beneath Dublin's crust.
Anne has lined up a
complete menagerie of anarchist and of animal, of cabaret and circus, of street performer and singer, and - naturally - of comedian, for this latest exploration and celebration of a new and, not so long ago, utterly unimaginable and entirely enjoyable Ireland. Oh - and as you enter, look up: that's Deirdre O'Connell, smiling joyfully. Not in vain, Deirdre, not in vain.