At this pressure-cooker time of year - too much work, too much shopping, too much to do - we could all do with a laugh. It's also a time of year when giving money to charity is on our minds. Not to mention the fact that it's the dreg-end of the year: a scant month from now, we'll all be wondering why we ate so many blasted biscuits, and how we're going to summon up the energy to do the "new year, new you" thing for the umpteenth time. A laugh? Evan a panicky smile would do, thanks very much, writes Arminta Wallace
Which is why the story of Jack and Mac is a quietly heartening one. Once upon a time Jack Morrissey and Brian McIvor were, in their own words, "corporate wage slaves" in a big Irish company. Then one of them jumped - or was he pushed? - into voluntary redundancy. He decided to mark his departure with a cabaret instead of a drinking session, and asked the other to help him write and perform the material.
"We asked people what they hated most about corporate life and said we'd put it into a song for them," recalls McIvor. "Early-morning meetings which go nowhere was one of the main things."
That was in 1994. Since then Jack and Mac have performed more times than they care to remember, raised a hatful of money for various charities, including Concern and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, recorded their first CD and are busy putting together a second.
On December 9th they'll be playing at the Mill Theatre in Dundrum - which they bill as "an alternative take on Christmas".
And wry smiles are what their show is all about, for the duo's weapon of choice is gentle subversion.
It's the same weapon used by Noel Coward when he wrote a tongue-in-cheek song called Don't Let's Be Beastly To The Germans which was promptly, and po-facedly, banned by the BBC during the second World War. Subversion was also the modus operandi of the brilliant Jewish-American satirist Tom Lehrer, whose song, I'm Spending Hanukah in Santa Monica, opens with the rhyme, "Those eastern winters, I can't endure 'em,/So every year I pack my gear and come out here 'til Purim. . ."
Lehrer's ode to innocent springtime pursuits, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, is one of Jack and Mac's most popular numbers. For Morissey, blessed with a fine light tenor voice, a love of words and a playful approach to language is at the heart of the musical comedy matter.
"The music has to be elegant, but the words have to be clever," he says. "People try to write funny songs, and they think it's funny if you put in the name of, say, a prominent politician - but that's not funny in itself.
"There has to be a clever rhyming system, and some element of surprise. That's the way to make people laugh. For example, we'll be doing Come Fly with Me.
"It will start off as Frank Sinatra used to sing it - and then it will transmogrify into a song about Ryanair and Michael O'Leary."
Jack and Mac are nothing if not contemporary in their concerns; they've penned parodies on the M50, and on the intricacies of mobile phone menus. In general, however, theirs is an old-fashioned kind of comedy.
McIvor sees their antecedents in radio programmes such as Stop the Week, when a satirical song had to be produced by the end of the programme using the material aired during the programme, and even in Bertolt Brecht and the Theatre of the Absurd.
On the whole, however, it's easy-going stuff - which is, he says, the way audiences like it. "The Flanders and Swann song The Gnu always goes down really well with people of all ages - and that's a very gentle thing," he says.
"Musically, though, it's wonderful. The verse is in one key and the chorus is in another. It gives a great opportunity to do things with the piano part."
Arrangements are McIvor's baby - and his obvious delight.
"Basically," he says. "I play what's on the page.
"But sometimes, you can slide in a different harmonic progression. Just to make people wonder, did he really do that?
"If a song suggests a village chime, of course, you have to do a village chime. I put a quotation from Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony into a song one night, and everybody was going - what the hell was that?
"We're trying to subvert the thing of 'Two baldy guys at the piano singing a song'. We're trying to put something else into it."
Something else. That's Jack and Mac to a T.
Jack and Mac play at the Mill Theatre, Dundrum, on Friday, December 9th. Their CD, They Can't Be Serious, can be obtained by emailing jackandmac@eircom.net or by writing to 10 Acorn Road, Dublin 16. The price is €10 and all profits go to Concern.