For his latest project, comedian Des Bishop is touring notorious neighbourhoods and getting locals to tell the jokes, he tells Kevin Courtney.
Here's a real alternative comedy circuit. Kick off with a gig in Ballymun, head down to the South Hill estate in Limerick, carry on to Cork, then head up to Tuam. On to the notorious Grove Tavern, deep in the loyalist stronghold of Mount Vernon, in north Belfast, and finish with a grand finale in Derry's Bogside. Along the way, be ribbed mercilessly by local hard men, get called a Fenian c*** by a loyalist heckler and get punched by a pugilistic Traveller, probably breaking a rib in the process. And you thought being a stand-up comedian was a doddle. Welcome to the real world.
If you're looking for someone who's unafraid to suffer for his comedy, then Des Bishop's your man. He'll happily put himself through the wringer if there's a chance he can squeeze two minutes of laughs from the experience. Forget David Blaine living in a box for 44 days; try working for the minimum wage as a shelf-stacker, burger- flipper or pool attendant, as Bishop did for Des Bishop's Work Experience, his first TV series.
Bishop's latest series, Des Bishop's Joy in the Hood, to be broadcast by RTÉ next year, sees the mouthy Irish-American blurring the lines between comedy and social work as he travels to marginalised communities around Ireland on a mission to set up some stand-up comedy workshops for the locals.
You're a Star it isn't. The goal is to get local children to try out their comedy skills in the workshops, then develop routines to perform in front of their neighbours and friends. If all goes according to plan, some might get chances to perform on the comedy circuit.
And what does Bishop get out of the deal? For a start, he gets rich material for his current stand-up show, Fitting In, which comes to Vicar Street in Dublin next week. He also gets to make a documentary series about it, with himself as the fall guy who has to help the wannabe comics stand up for themselves.
"Normally, if you take a general documentary about, say, South Hill in Limerick, there'll be this dreary music, it'll focus on a lot of burnt-out houses and somebody will give their depressing story about how they can't survive there," he says. "So everybody just assumes that life there is a total mess. Whereas when you get four comedians from the area, and they get up and they joke about some of those negative things - but also show that people are getting on with their lives - it instills a little confidence in the community. We're not looking to solve anything; it's just a better way to let people know what's going on."
For a blow-in - he spent his early childhood in New York and came to Ireland in his teens - Bishop displays an admirable fascination with all things Irish. And he admits that, as a child, he was also fascinated with the seamier side of city life, the vagrants and vagabonds who trooped through the appalling US welfare system and crashed out in the numerous dosshouses near his neighbourhood.
"When I was a kid in New York, I used to have an obsession with welfare hotels. I used to have my mother drive me through South Bronx. I don't know why; I'm just addicted to bad neighbourhoods. I don't mean that in a patronising way; there's just something in me that wants to find out what's going on in there. My mother used to run a homeless shelter in our parish - St Kevin's. I used to hang out with these bums from the Bowery, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. The attitude in our house is that helping people was a fun thing to do. That's kind of where it comes from for me."
When it came to making the series, Bishop decided to immerse himself in each of the communities he was visiting, even if most locals believed that the lippy Yank was there only to have a laugh at their expense.
"Thanks be to God that I had got to a stage where people kind of knew me, so there was an element of curiosity from that end, which helped a lot. But then, when we went up to the loyalist area, it didn't exist at all. No one knew me from Adam. We ran into a few problems as a result."
To infiltrate the UVF stronghold of Mount Vernon, Bishop needed someone with clout to vouch for him; luckily, he was able to count on Billy Hutchinson, of the Progressive Unionist Party, to ensure him safe passage. "It was scary going into Mount Vernon, me being a Catholic, but they were very nice. It was the one community where we had to make sure we were invited."
Wherever possible, Bishop would stay with a local for his visit and do whatever was required to fit in with the community. If that meant helping someone haul a TV off a top-floor balcony, stoke up a "sectarian" bonfire or write up anti-Catholic jokes, then so be it. "We just put on these auditions and let people know we were going to do a comedy workshop. Generally, in a community like Ballymun, which was the biggest place we went to, you're going to get at least four or five people who have thought about it. There's people dying to be entertainers, there's people dying to be on TV, so you're bound to get a few people in. We engaged with community workers, and community arts groups, and told them: Anybody you know who likes to tell a joke, just tell them to come down.
"That was how we did it. But in different communities there are different levels of trust, and there was a huge scepticism about what we were doing in most of these places. So getting the comedians was only the first challenge. The rest is to get the trust."
Whether Bishop earned their trust, or helped young comedians get a foot on the comedy ladder, will be revealed when the series is broadcast; in the meantime, you can hear his thoughts about the experience when he heads on tour, taking to the stage in 15 venues over the coming weeks.
"The great thing is that you have the stand-up as a kind of document of what you experience. Those are just my funny conclusions. But, for me, what it's about is that eight people are still doing stand-up comedy as a result. And in Ballymun three of the guys from the workshop now run their own comedy club. Nobody else does it for them. And two of the Travellers have booked gigs in the International [ Bar, in central Dublin, where Bishop comperes a comedy club].
"You hear about these places on the news all the time, and you see the church writing about them, and you see the politicians using them to their benefit, but you very rarely hear the voice of people from those communities, just talking about what's going on for them."
Des Bishop is at Vicar Street, Dublin, from next Thursday to Saturday and from September 22nd to September 25th