PROFILE DAVID O'DOHERTYDublin comedian David O'Doherty has taken the main prize at Edinburgh despite being the purveyor of a brand of 'very low-energy musical whimsy' that many thought wouldn't be edgy enough to win over the judges
EDINBURGH IN AUGUST is an orgy of the arts. Festivals collide into each other, millions of pounds of funding is up for grabs, desperate fame-hungry wannabes chow down with raddled old has-beens and notables such as Jeremy Paxman, Germaine Greer, JK Rowling and, eh, Michael Barrymore elbow their way to the top media table by dint of a "controversial" word or deed. This glorious showcase of the very best in opera, drama, ballet and literature takes place in a city where the air is charged with a clamorous sense of competitiveness. The lippy young brat of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is personified by the hordes of stand-up comedians who parachute themselves in, hoping to replicate the deeds of names such as Peter Cook, Stephen Fry, Eddie Izzard, Peter Kay et al, who all first impacted on the public consciousness at the festival and parlayed their ground-breaking appearances into hugely successful comedy careers.
For one of this year's contenders for the prestigious If.comedy (formerly Perrier) award, Dubliner David O'Doherty, there was a very inauspicious beginning in his quest to be labelled the "funniest person on the Fringe" (which is basically what the If.comedy award signifies). At one of his early shows at the beginning of his month-long run he was hit by perhaps the worst and most confidence-sapping heckle a comedian can ever receive. As O'Doherty bounded about the stage, working his socks off in the pursuit of a comedy result, a lone voice shouted out from the darkness: "Does this get any good soon?" Devastating.
O'Doherty paused as all eyes in the venue turned to see who had delivered this most blunt of criticisms. It's one thing voicing your considered opinion in the bar after the show but to interrupt a performer so brutally in the middle of a routine. O'Doherty gradually composed himself and broke the fourth wall to earnestly reassure the five-year-old boy in his audience that indeed his show would be getting quite good soon.
The show was I Can't Sleep, the children's comedy routine that O'Doherty was performing every afternoon at the festival alongside Cork comedian Maeve Higgins. For O'Doherty, an audience of attention-deficit five-year-olds is the most critical audience of all and a million times harder to crack than the adult judging panel from the comedy award who last Saturday night deemed O'Doherty's evening solo show, Let's Comedy, the best of the 800-odd eligible contenders on this year's Fringe.
Accepting his award from Australian broadcaster and journalist Clive James, O'Doherty, aged 32 and from Ballsbridge, dispensed with the usual award-winning platitudes and instead heavily criticised the increasingly commercial and sponsorship-driven Fringe. To many, the Fringe is stand-up comedy (even though it also encompasses drama, physical theatre and music), but this year the three main venues removed themselves from the Fringe banner (the Fringe spirit had largely been inspired by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennet with their Beyond the Fringe show in the early 1960s in Edinburgh and as such has a revered status) and relabelled themselves the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, all the better to attract sponsorship money.
As a Fringe "name" - O'Doherty is one of the few comics who can sell out his entire run during August - this new Edinburgh Comedy Festival beast was eager to have him perform his show in one of their approved venues, but O'Doherty instead opted for a smaller, punkier, all-year-round comedy venue, thus, at a stroke, removing himself from the Edinburgh Comedy Festival banner and, in effect, bloodying its nose by winning the main award from an independent venue. But that has always been O'Doherty's politely curmudgeonly way since his brother got him on to the guest list for a Kevin McAleer gig at the Olympia, Dublin, 12 years ago and he determined there and then to become a stand-up comedian.
O'Doherty is from an arty family (his father Jim Doherty is the well-known jazz pianist and his brother Mark is an award-winning playwright and now a screenwriter), and the O' in his surname was only inserted in an attempt to differentiate himself from his brother, who was also a stand-up comedian when David first began his career. It was a long and tall shadow that David had to climb out from - to many aficionados Mark Doherty was one of the best comedians this country ever produced and you don't have to travel too far in Edinburgh to hear any number of household UK comedy names still talk enthusiastically about his material. Too many lunchtime gigs in the canteens of regional Irish colleges prompted Mark to move into the slightly calmer waters of the theatre world, but David had a mission (as much as any comic can) to produce high-quality work that would never be diluted by the instant-quip demands of TV panel programmes - or by the soul-destroying lack of interest displayed by audiences at lunchtime in the canteens of regional Irish colleges.
ARMED WITH HIS ever-present and trusty old children's Casio keyboard, O'Doherty began where every other Irish Edinburgh award winner before him has begun - in Dublin's famous Comedy Cellar club, on the first floor of the International Bar on Wicklow Street. It was there in 1989 that the comedy trio Mr Trellis (Barry Murphy, Ardal O'Hanlon, Kevin Gildea), along with solo acts Dermot Carmody and Alex Lyons first pioneered an Irish version of what was then known as "alternative comedy".
Every Irish Edinburgh winner or nominee ever - Dylan Moran, Tommy Tiernan, Ed Byrne, Andrew Maxwell, Jason Byrne, Sean Hughes, Graham Norton et al - owes a debt to the creatively enriching atmosphere of the Cellar, and O'Doherty singled out the venue's ethos and its influence on him in his acceptance speech last weekend.
Whether doing material (and this is before Des Bishop got his fáinne) about how the Irish language could be saved by dubbing porn films into Irish, or riffing on the absurdity of truncated mobile phone text speech, O'Doherty laid out his stall early on. He was a purveyor of "very low-energy musical whimsy" who stayed well away from the shaggin' and boozin' concerns of the then all-dominant "lads comedy", and he has retained that approach even in the face of a contemporary comedy world where it can seem you are constitutionally obliged to do questionable material about racism and make cack-handed jokes about paedophiles in order to appear "edgy" and "dangerous".
O'Doherty has previous form at the festival. In 1999 he won the Channel 4 talent-search competition So You Think You're Funny. Not really a big deal - until you consider the runner-up was Jimmy Carr. Back then he was a close buddy of Russell Brand - the two made an unlikely couple around Edinburgh's bars, Brand with his crack pipe and O'Doherty (a teetotaler) with his chocolate milkshake. The two were pretty much on an even comedy keel for a few years until a reality TV spin-off propelled Brand into the stratosphere. O'Doherty still can't quite get his head around his friend's superstardom and now has a life-long aversion to tabloid newspapers.
"Can Nice Guys Win?" was the headline in London's Evening Standard newspaper over an article that dismissed O'Doherty's chances of winning the If.comedy this year. While all the UK broadsheet reviewers (who take Edinburgh and the award very seriously) were mightily impressed by O'Doherty's show this year, there was always the qualification that his material was too "nice and whimsical" to triumph over harder-hitting comics with their rough 'n' tough "issues" routines.
Not the bookies' favourite for the award, O'Doherty surprised many with his win - but not the chairman of the judging panel, the seen-it-all and very-hard-to-impress theatre impresario Nica Burns, who effusively praised his "utterly delightful" show, saying that "an hour with David O'Doherty fills the world with laughter and charm and sends you home on a wave of happiness".
There were some eyebrows raised in the comedy establishment when the judges gave the prize to O'Doherty, given that he's a very vocal critic of the Perrier/If.comedy process. When he was nominated, but didn't win the award two years ago, he told the UK press that "any competition in the arts is fundamentally ridiculous" and said that the award seemed to go to the act with the most industrious PR team behind them.
Friend and fellow Irish comic Des Bishop who was at the award ceremony to cheer O'Doherty on, said he was going to take out a Ryanair-style "Congratulations David" advertisement in the Irish press to mark O'Doherty's victory before realising that, while the award may have a very high profile in the UK, it still doesn't mean that much here. "The best thing about David winning is that he has been rewarded for being a pure comic and an 'ideas' comic," says Bishop. "I remember years ago in the Comedy Cellar trying to give him some business advice, but he just sort of looked blankly back at me."
Another Irish comedy source praises the fact that O'Doherty is not as graspingly desperate to get on TV as many of his peers. "It is a good thing that he refuses to appear on all those crappy TV comedy panel programmes," he, or maybe she, says. "True to type, he is critical of the comedy establishment but in his own gentle way. Remember though, he is a nice middle-class boy and like all of us he will talk when he has tickets to sell, but it's just that he has some quality control about him. Instead of appearing on Have I Got News for You, which he could do, he'll keep playing the Comedy Cellar for next to no money."
THE DAY AFTER his If.comedy award, O'Doherty cancelled all his remaining shows at the festival and refused to do any media. He genuinely had lost his voice - the result of doing up to five shows a day for the entire month of August - but it was nevertheless a handy get-out for a man who (some may say quaintly) believes that comedy can be and should be an art form and not a stepping stone to a career as a TV host.
O'Doherty pocketed £8,000 (almost €10,000) for winning the award and will get to headline a London West End theatre in October as part of his prize. Typically an Edinburgh winner takes one of two routes: they either, like Frank Skinner, immediately embark on a lucrative UK theatre tour and later sign an even more lucrative contract to present a TV show or, like the winner from three years ago, Laura Solon, they sit out the merry-go-round and develop their own ideas for their own show in their own time and on their own terms.
It's not too difficult to guess which route O'Doherty will take: this is a man who said last week that "comedy for me is not a glitzy champagne award show in a nightclub where you find yourself sitting beside someone wearing £500 Prada glasses. It's about getting new material together in a cold flat in November."
THE O'DOHERTY FILE
Name:The abbreviated D O'D, as in "dee-o-dee", is what he prefers.
Set-up:Nice guy wins big award at Edinburgh Festival but then shows himself to be not so nice when he uses the phrase "It's total bullshit" to describe what the organisers are trying to do to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Punchline:As he says himself, while bashing out chords on his children's Casio keyboard: "I'm gonna rock your world - but in a quite gentle type of way." If you get your skates on, you can be gently rocked - and see what all the fuss in the UK is about - when he plays the Electric Picnic's comedy tent tonight in Stradbally. Just don't call him "the new Russell Brand".