Comedy

Here’s my favourite Dara O’Briain story. The last time I saw him in the flesh, so to speak, was at comedy website Chortle’s awards ceremony earlier this year. ‘And the winner of the award for Best Theatre Tour goes to… Dara O’Brian,’ the presenter announced, or rather mispronounced. The large, jovial Irishman bounced up on to the stage laughing. ‘Tragically, Dara O’Brian can’t be here tonight,’ he said, eyes twinkling. ‘So to collect it on his behalf is Dara O’Briain. Which is my actual fucking name!’

That in itself wouldn’t be a great story. However, the real punchline was to come just moments later, when O'Briain himself was charged with presenting one of the comedy gongs. ‘And the winners of the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Comedy is the “I’m Sorry I Haven’t Got A Clue” team. To accept the award please welcome Tim Brooke-Taylor and Barry Took.’ The audience sniggered as a slightly disgruntled Barry Cryer walked on, snatched the glass plaque and said, ‘Barry Took’s dead.’ It’s one thing to mispronounce a name, quite another to introduce an entirely different comic to the one waiting in the wings – especially when the comedian you have mistakenly introduced died in 2002. Feature continues

I tactfully remind O’Briain of this when we meet for lunch. ‘You saw that? Damn. That’s unfair, though, it was kind of dumped on me at the last minute,’ he shakes his head. ‘I had made the point to the producer that I’d never listened to the show in my life. I know it’s meant to be great, but, you know, in Ireland we don’t get British radio. So knowing nothing about it, I go on and give this long speech about how fantastic it is. I got to the end of it and I thought: I have fucking nailed this! I was proud I had twisted an awkward situation into a success… and then I introduced the dead man.’

His burger arrives and he tucks in. ‘I think it’s harsh to tell that as a story of my incompetence, rather than my ability to sell anything.’
He has a point. O’Briain is possibly one of the best comics when it comes to creating hysterical material on the spot, simply from the banter he has with an audience. Most comics will, at some point during their set, try their hands at ‘making funnies’ from some punter interaction, but few have taken it to the level that O’Briain achieves. ‘They key thing is confidence. You tell yourself, “What I am about to say is going to be funny,” and you go with it. Basically, you open your mouth and hope stuff is going to flood out of your head. There are tricks to get better at it, but it’s really a matter of practice.’

Another factor, which accounts for his skill and success at this freeform comedic scatting, is the fact that he appears to be genuinely interested in his audience. Rather than simply ridicule someone to gain some cheap laughs, he fully engages with them, sometimes transforming their humdrum jobs and lives into heroic, almost legendary, endeavours.

‘They are this huge resource. I’m standing on stage in front of a thousand people and there’s me with my set of stories and then there’s them, who presumably have loads of things that they would like to tell me. I fling out questions and they come back with stuff which is always new and fresh and gives me something to work with.’

He is a consummate master of catching gossamer threads of potential humour and transforming them into comedy spun gold. ‘There’s a great description in a Douglas Adams book, when Arthur Dent discovers how to fly. Apparently the way to do it is to fall and then get distracted. At which point you forget you’ve just fallen and take off. That essentially, whether he meant it or not, is the best description of writing jokes – you trigger yourself to not think about something and then something comes out. If you think about a gag too heavily it’ll end up being really predictable.’

And how does he distract himself? ‘When I have a show to write I put it off until I begin to panic. Then I’ll open a bottle of wine and just start. For the first two glasses, I’m rubbish, there’s nothing. But by glass four…’

So that’s the secret – in vino hilaritas. Though presumably always remember to stop just before you forget how to pronounce your own name.
Dara O’Briain plays the Hammersmith Apollo on May 12.