The legendary Comedy Cellar started 20 years ago tonight. Comic Kevin Gildearecounts his and others' memories, and the years of the influential 'college for comedy'
Three young men stand in a line on stage, hands to their ears as though holding phones. I am the one in the middle. I am Pat. To my left is Ardal O'Hanlon and to my right is Barry Murphy - they are Callers.
Welcome to the Pat Phone-in Show:
Caller 1:Hello Pat - Pat?
Pat:Yes, Caller.
Caller 1:Pat - I'd like to complain about these new all-seater stadiums - I mean - there'll be no room for the players to play.
Pat:Thank you caller. Another caller on line 2:
Caller 2:Pat - where do people get off . . . saying this is my stop?
Pat:Hmmm. Now we have a hoax caller on Line 6.
Caller 3:I'm on Line 4, Pat.
Pat:Good one. Hello - what's your opinion?
Caller 4:Pat - why do they never play Chinese music on the radio?
Pat:Why - are you a fan?
Caller 4:Well, that's the thing Pat - I don't know yet.
That 20-year-old snapshot is of a comedy group called Mr Trellis. In the 1980s, Dublin was cold war East Berlin compared to now: we had few of the choices people have these days. Our one big choice was coming home drunk, looking at the change in the palms of our hands and thinking: "Will I buy a kebab or will I buy a house? Aaah - I'll buy a house tomorrow!" The only shopping centre had just two shops: one shop sold nails and the other sold pictures of hammers; that sums up 1980s Ireland.
Dublin offered an equally bleak comedy vista: there were only glimpses of an alternative way of laughter: Hall's Pictorial Weekly and Dermot Morgan on RTÉ, the sketch group The God Squad and a triumvirate of emigrant comics in Michael Redmond, Ian MacPherson and Sean Hughes who'd escaped to London.
In Britain, Channel 4 had shaken things up with The Young Ones. We hunker-gathered in our cave-dark bedsits, around a battered cassette player with a door that opened so slowly you could make soup before you had the chance to change the cassette to the other side. We listened in awe to fragments of routines from a mythical festival that supposedly existed in Edinburgh - but may as well have been in Outer Mongolia.
Somehow we wanted to make contact. The first thing was to put ourselves in front of an audience. That's why a small group of would-be funny-men opened a club upstairs in the International Bar: the Comedy Cellar. Twenty years later, people are still climbing that stairway to the comedy heaven that is Ireland's longest running comedy venue, which Ardal O'Hanlon says was "the Petri dish in which a new strain of Irish comedy was conceived".
We approached Anne Donohue who ran the International Bar, and she agreed. Credit for the success of the Cellar goes to the staff over the years: Simon McEvoy, Allan Martin, John Francis and Anne's sons John and James.
In February 1988 we performed our first show in the Cellar. It was a Tuesday and six people played to 24 people: myself, Barry, Ardal and Dermot Carmody comprised Mr Trellis (or Mr Trellis - The Mormon as it was then called. Our plan was to add a different religion/occupation for each gig; given the decade that was in it, Mr Trellis - the Unemployed was a subsequent possibility). Karl MacDermott (later author of The Creative Lower Being) brought experience to the proceedings as the only one who had put on comedy shows before. MC for the (one and only) night was Gerry Brett, flatmate and civil servant.
The show that night comprised a collection of sketches and songs (music provided courtesy of Mr Carmody, with character monologues emanating from Mr MacDermott). I remember little of the night; Ardal remembers he was wobbling with nerves and Karl remembers that it was windy. Gerry remembers it was so windy they closed O'Connell Street because of flying slates.
OVER THE NEXT few years a procession of comics followed the promise of a thousand And Next Up We Haves - often stumbling, bumbling, wobbling - some standing up, some falling down. In 1988/1989 The Quacksquad - Joe Rooney (Killinaskully) and Paul Tylack (Stew) appeared - a street-cool twosome with their crazy banter and hilarious songs. They injected renewed energy into what Karl describes as "the heady comic broth of youthful endeavour, Dadaism and spilt beer".
The early 1990s saw the appearance of Comic Souffle, Morgan Jones, Mark Staunton, Conor Lambert, Pom Boyd, Michelle Read and Anne Gildea. Anne and Michelle had moved from London where Michelle was well established on the comedy circuit and Anne did open spots in comedy clubs and performed esoteric poetry in poetry clubs. "What I loved about the Cellar was that it felt like a combination of both of those types of spaces," she observes.
In 1991 Fatman's Picnic Basket rolled along. Ian Coppinger and Paddy Hickey spotted the comedy listing for the Cellar in the local What's On (or "Why's It On?" as it was known then) and Paddy contacted Dermot Carmody by writing a letter (an activity freakishly old-fashioned today yet strange even by the standards of those days). Ian says the first time he went to the Cellar he was "blown away". By that stage, Mr Trellis had added individual spots to their repertoire and Dermot was a full-blown comedy music act. Also on the bill were Michelle and Karl . Ian says they had written sketches that they "thought the audience would like" but, after seeing the show, realised they could produce more surreal stuff that was closer to their hearts.
While Ian Coppinger was inspired by being "blown away" in 1992, Eddie Bannon was inspired by being deeply unimpressed. On his first visit he recalls an open spot by "some actor guy" who performed a set that involved playing invisible drums. Eddie thought he could do better and he did - going on to become an accomplished stand-up and improviser, and later director of the Smithwick's Cat Laughs comedy festival.
The first few years were the most exciting as we were learning about what we were doing and the audience were learning at the same time - we were as surprised as them at what we produced. In 1992, the Cellar was in a slump. Alex Lyons appeared (with fellow advertising copywriter Gerry Kennedy) and injected much-needed energy - not least the iconic Cellar poster with the big face beaming from the top of a pint of stout. Audiences increased.
The early 1990s also saw the emergence of Dylan Moran from cocoon to fully formed butterfly of stand-up in one open spot set. He had everything from the get-go. A born stand-up walking straight out of the womb.
It was also the peak for Mr Trellis and their repertoire of sketches: The Playboy, The RTÉ sketch, The Interview, Time Vampires, La Familie Bertillion, Johhny "O", Headache Ad, Minamilism - The Quiz Show, and impressions of films by synchronised swimmers. We usually ended our set with the storming Tales of the Unexpected parody.
Dermot Carmody developed a powerful catalogue of musical comedy, led by Colossal Pervert For Your Love and the hilarious Christy Moore-inspired In The Back Of A Van. MacDermott developed his character material to the apex of the sketch where Hamlet was directed by Martin Scorsese - with Joe Pesci, DeNiro et al playing all the main roles.
Through the Cellar, Anne Gildea met Sue Collins and in 1995 they formed The Nualas with Tara Flynn. "The Cellar remained our fave and trusty spot to try out new material," says Anne.
Ardal cites Dylan Moran's debut as a highlight of his memories of the Cellar, along with the 20-minute set performed by Eddie Izzard. In the mid-1990s Eddie was at a wedding in Wicklow and said he'd come and video Mr Trellis. (We had played a venue he ran at the Edinburgh Fringe the previous year and he liked our act so much he said he'd book English gigs for us if we sent him a video. But we didn't, so he came and did it himself.)
Barry: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Palladium.
Ardal: Next up, it's Harvey the Heckler.
(Kevin Gildea runs on stage. Pause.)
Kevin: Get off, I'm shit!
(Kevin exits stage.)
The mid-1990s saw a mini-exodus as Ardal, Kevin and Dermot left for London to follow solo courses. But a seed had been sown which was to blossom when Ardal starred in Father Ted, Tommy Tiernan and Dylan won the Perrier, and, back home, Barry flew the flag at RTÉ with the ominously titled The End and, later, the brilliant Après Match.
Barry passed on the running of the Cellar to Eddie Bannon who passed it to Ian Coppinger who passed it to Brendan Dempsey who passed it to Paddy Courtney (Paddywhackery) and Fiona Byrne (who together staged the first all-female comics night in the early 2000s) who passed it to PJ Gallagher (Naked Camera) who passed it to the current minder Andrew Stanley (I Dare Ya).
And so the Cellar, a small room above a pub, was club-run by successive generations. It passed down like an heirloom through generations of comics - booking the acts, putting up the smiley pint backdrop and opening the Wednesday door to comics as diverse as David O'Doherty, Neil Delamare, Jason Byrne, Dara Ó Briain, Maeve Higgins, Deirdre O'Kane and many more.
School, academy, unofficial house of learning, kindergarten, university - it was all these things. And this before comedy courses and nights devoted exclusively to open spots. In this new age, Dermot Carmody (who now hosts a monthly gig "Last of the 1989 show" in MB Slattery's pub in Rathmines) believes "the Cellar is gone in essence". Yet Bernard O'Shea (one half of "TJ and TJ off the radio" - the other being Cellar regular John Colleary) believes there is a unique vibe in the Cellar on Wednesdays and says "I always go a bit nuts and rarely do a planned set - I always try something new," because of the slightly more acccepting audiences.
A newer comic, FJ Murray, did his first open spot in November 2006. He says: "The people go there solely to laugh and have a good time, which creates an atmosphere that is hard to find . . . They want you to succeed."
WHICH BRINGS US back to the first Cellar audiences - listening, supportive, meeting you half-way. It is from this creative involvement that an audience helps create a milieu for risk-taking that leads to inventive comedy. In a comedy world where there is much pandering and crowd controlling, such venues should be treasured for they generate originality and diversity.
Referencing comedians' performance credits like this may feel like a CV - and to an extent it is a CV, of the Cellar. While in no way wishing to claim it as the source of all the comedy in Ireland, its foundation was a little bang that has contributed to a healthy diversity of comedy . As Ardal says: "It is undoubtedly the spiritual home of contemporary Irish comedy."
Its enduring success is that it has schooled many generations of comics, that it still functions as a viable independent venue run by comics for comics (and audiences) and that it is now one among many: the International Bar alone now hosts comedy seven nights a week.
So the Cellar is alive and well - here's to another 20 years of the place described by Barry Murphy as "a place to fail - gloriously and without bruising. And a place to polish the shiny stuff."
Thus a safety net is created to allow the beautiful thing to happen: an audience goes out half way to meet the performer and comes back full circle - to the Comedy Cellar.
Kevin Gildea performs stand-up in a summer tour of theatres around Ireland. Anne Gildea is also on the bill.