PRESENT TENSE:IS THIS the only country in the world in which popular television programmes take a few minutes out to lampoon their own show, host, and guests? Maybe they're doing this in Cameroon or Korea, employing people to create a parallel, cartoonish version of the shows and insert them within the real thing, where they are like pins pressing on a hot air balloon.
RTÉ led the way years ago, sometimes going direct from the studio of O’Herlihy, Dunphy and Giles to
Après Match
doing an immediate takedown of the exact conversation that preceded their sketch. For a long time, they had the field to themselves.
But during this election, Mario Rosenstock has been arriving in the middle of Tonight with Vincent Browne. He plays a version of the host only marginally exaggerated from the real thing and versions of the panellists that are taken to ludicrous extremes.
Aside from the spot-on version of Browne – playful, impatient, dishevelled, glaring through his eyebrows – and some great lines about the “Twitter machine”, the writing doesn’t always sustain even the short sketches. But the caricatures are great. You mightn’t believe there was much of a market for Constantin Gurdgiev impressions, but only if you haven’t seen Rosenstock don a helmet fringe and stroke a white cat.
The economist was on the panel on Wednesday. “After the break, we have a surprise for Constantin,” said the real Browne (through his eyebrows), teeing up the sketch. The show ended with Browne doing an impression of Rosenstock doing an impression of Gurdgiev. Economists who go on late-night current affairs panels don’t tend to be fodder for comedians. They certainly don’t expect to be caught in this post-modern weirdness. “I don’t think you do as good a mimic of yourself as the other fella does,” concluded Browne.
It has been a good election for comedy and, in parts, for satire. Although nothing could possibly match Gerry Adams’s line on Newstalk that the Universal Social Charge is a “gross act of terrorism”. Who writes his material? It’s as subversive as the man himself.
Actually, so much of what has happened in this country has seemed so beyond satire that it has taken a while for comedians to finally catch up. Although the responsibility is no longer theirs. This election instead confirmed what we already knew, that this is the age of citizen satire. Every poster that’s scrawled on gets put up online; every cameraphone is ready to go; any decent footage is immediately highlighted, aggregated on the likes of Broadsheet.ie or in this paper’s Campaign Trail column.
You could have followed this election purely through virals and got a pretty good sense of what was going on. The best routine? The video of the deadpan anarchist claiming that he’ll vote Fianna Fáil: “We believe in complete destruction of society . . . Fianna Fáil have been doing a fantastic job.”
The best use of Photoshop? Turning the Frontlinedebate into an episode of The Weakest Link.
The best commentary of the debates? The second-by-second coverage on Twitter, so voluminous that it became a globally trending topic.
Nevertheless, some good satire has come through the traditional media: Oliver Callan's fitful radio show Green Tea, Rosenstock on Browne, Après Match's Murphy on The Eleventh Hour. But even these have been pushed along by online exposure. The best of the television sketches, such as Murphy's exceptional parody of the Terminal 2 television ad, must by now have been watched by as many people online as saw it on TV.
Murphy’s sketches have been free from the need to navel-gaze in the way that Rosenstock’s do. Because there are certain rules when it comes to a show satirising itself. Browne, as with the RTÉ football panel, is an institution, his character so familiar and so particular that he doesn’t just live with the comedy but thrive on the viewers’ relish of the in-jokes.
The Eleventh Hourcouldn't do it because it hasn't had time to establish itself, create characters, foster familiarity and affection. You could write a joke about Daire O'Brien's mac, but even those who get it won't care. You could riff on Keelin Shanley's mannerisms, but only if you want viewers to turn over to Vincent Browne.
So, while the two shows have competed directly on serious analysis and irreverence, each has ushered its comedians in complementary routes: Murphy outwards, Rosenstock inwards. But both men now share membership of a peculiarly Irish and cosily subversive club: the in-show lampoon.
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