Take a look at the British television schedules for next week, and you'll notice a remarkable thing: there are Irishmen everywhere. Dylan Moran is back for a second series of the BBC's fish-out-of-water comedy drama, How Do You Want Me? Tommy Tiernan takes the starring role of an underachieving video store assistant in the new Channel 4 sit-com, Small Potatoes (which also features another Irish name, Morgan Jones), and the country's most successful TV comedy writing team, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, unveil their latest offering, Hippies (see bottom of page), on BBC2 on Friday. All of these feature prominently in Gift of the Gag, Stephen Dixon and Deirdre Falvey's new book about the explosion in Irish comedy which has taken place over the past decade.
One of the problems about trying to analyse comedy is the way it turns to dust under scrutiny. Howard Jacobson's series, Seriously Funny, for the BBC a while back would better have been titled Hilariously Serious. Gay Byrne's recent archival series Make 'Em Laugh may have been a ratings success for RTE, but Byrne's undoubted admiration of the skills of classic comedians translated into a pedantic obsession with technique over content.
Falvey and Dixon, who make their livings as journalists with The Irish Times and Irish Independent respectively, and have written extensively about comedy over the years, have taken a different route. Looking for a way to avoid the trap of a thuddingly chronological approach, the pair decided to draw on Vivian Mercier's 1961 study, The Irish Comic Tradition, which divides written comedy into four different strands: Absurd Humour; Wit; Satire; and Parody.
"We realised that we could trace the roots of modern comedy back to what Billy Magra was doing in the early 1980s, or to the Comedy Cellar 10 years ago, but that would have been very drab," says Dixon. "You could pick any kind of structure, I suppose, but the Mercier definition was very useful for combining analysis, entertainment and telling people's own different stories."
Gift of the Gag is largely composed of the words of the performers themselves, talking about their childhoods, their early days on stage, and their own opinions about the business, interspersed with excerpts from their own routines. The result is a book which offers something for the general reader, while providing the fan with the most comprehensive account to date of the course of recent Irish comedy.
The book is almost exclusively about the "new Irish comedy" of the last dozen years, and the current generation of twenty and thirtysomethings who have redefined the art of stand-up in particular. "We started off thinking that we'd do the entire range of Irish comedy," says Falvey. "But then we decided that there was a very definite break between what was happening now and in the past."
So Frank Kelly appears, but largely by virtue of his Father Ted duties. There is a vitriolic and (unintentionally) hilarious contribution from Noel V. Ginnity, who describes one of the younger breed as "funny as f***ing cancer". Great stuff, and one of the few glimpses we get of the nasty streak which traditionally runs through a lot of comedians. "He probably articulates something which a lot of people feel. There's a generational thing about comedy now, which wasn't there before," says Falvey.
But Dixon, who has a longstanding interest in early 20th century music hall and variety, believes that it's possible to trace the comedy tradition back over the generations. "Dylan Moran used to watch Max Wall on television. And when Max Wall was a child, he used to stand in the wings and watch Little Tich. And who did Little Tich watch? Grimaldi or somebody. So you get this kind of extraordinary timeless quality which goes down through the centuries."
Of all Mercier's categories, satire seems the one which is least lively at the moment, particularly in the Republic, despite the ample targets offered by institutional and political corruption. Some of the Northern comedians quoted in the book are scathing about the smugness of comedy from the South. "I'd love to see some angry, concerned comedians, but that's just not happening," says Falvey. "I suppose everything has retreated to the personal. I do wish there was somebody out there who was doing something strong in that area, but the comedians themselves just don't seem to be interested in that."
Interestingly, RTE finally launched a satirical TV show just this week, Bull Island, employing several of the voices behind Radio 1's Short Circuit. But if any one thing epitomises the failure of the national broadcaster in the 1990s, it must be the way it sat on its hands while an entire generation of talented young entertainers upped and left for the UK, where they received a rapturous welcome. "It's a huge embarrassment for RTE, of course," says Dixon. "Not just that they haven't picked up on these people, but that British broadcasters have. I would hope that things are changing, and there are individuals working in there who are committed to comedy, but it's still down to isolated individuals. There's no notion of structures for developing people and ideas." He points to a quote from Billy Magra in the book, about the way that talent in Britain is incubated in radio before being tried out in television, but that in RTE "the entertainment departments in radio and TV don't even speak, don't even relate to each other".
Laid out in black and white, the evidence against RTE is damning, but Gift of the Gag is as fair as it can be about the broadcaster's financial and structural difficulties, while Falvey points to the public outrage at Tommy Tiernan's "blasphemous" appearance on The Late Late Show as an example of the kind of thing which partly explains the station's conservatism. "If something like that gets that sort of reaction, then maybe you can understand why RTE gets nervous." But, despite RTE, there's now a general impression for the first time in this country that it's actually possible to make a living as a comedian. "There is a kind of idea that it's more of a career option," agrees Falvey. "There are people coming out of school who want to go into comedy. You can almost see that kind of calculating approach, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's certainly a change." It's interesting to see an emerging nostalgia among the comedians in the book about the early, idealistic poverty-stricken days in the Comedy Cellar, though many, like Ardal O'Hanlon, pour scorn on such revisionism.
AS in every other country, though, comedy in Ireland seems inordinately testosterone-driven. "It's because men are thicker-skinned," believes Dixon. "The thing about comedians is that they're usually not very good when they get up on stage for the first time. Dylan Moran would be an exception - he was more or less fully formed when he did it for the first time. But most are learning what they're doing for the first time. Michelle Read talks about that thing of getting up on stage for the first time, and you're shit, and being able to get up the next night, and you're still shit. And then you start getting better. Of course some of them never get better. . ."
Which is part of the attraction of stand-up comedy, isn't it? Unlike most other forms of public self-expression, the possibility that the performer may just crash and burn is an integral and essential part of the experience. "You don't get that at a rock gig, and you certainly don't get it at the Gate or the Abbey," says Dixon. "There's an edge which attracts a lot of people to it, and it's certainly part of what attracted us."
Gift of the Gag: The Explosion in Irish Comedy, is published by Blackstaff Press. (£14.99)
