Tickling the English

by Dara O Briain

  Now, this sounds like my kind of crowd.

  Tunbridge Wells Assembly Hall Theatre

  1 owner of a drain-cleaning company

  1 salesman of engineering equipment

  1 unemployed hedge-fund manager

  Or not.

  The engineering-equipment guy was the most fun, since he sold levelling equipment and we had a long discussion about spirit levels and how difficult it was to create a more high-tech version of something that was working perfectly well, using only a bubble.

  If you want to find the minimum area of the surface across any contour, use a bubble. If you want to make a child laugh, use a bubble. Bubbles are nature’s little problem-solvers.

  I couldn’t find out how useful bubbles were in the cleaning of drains, since the man in my crowd owned the drain-cleaning company and therefore didn’t do any of the drain-cleaning himself. This makes him more successful, but less useful in the search for funny. This is one of the corollaries of Dara’s Second Law again. People are universally interested in jobs they know have to be done but which they couldn’t imagine doing themselves. They’re also interested in muck and the mysterious internal workings of their own home. This is why tradesmen often have homeowners leaning over their shoulders while they work. It’s not to check on their integrity. It’s because we’ve never seen that panel taken off the wall before. That’s exciting to us soft-handed types.

  What people aren’t that interested in is what it’s like to run a small business. So bad news for the drain-cleaning boss. More time on the shop floor for him. And next time a comic asks for the best thing he’s found down a drain, start with a human arm and work up from there. A telescope, a magic amulet, pet skeletons, the other £26 million in cash from the Tonbridge Securitas robbery – all of these would have been great answers.

  The hedge-fund manager would have welcomed some of that cash. It was now mid-November, and the credit crunch was in full swing, but this was the first person of the tour to give the crowd a slap in the face with it. Not that he meant to; it was an honest answer to the question ‘What do you do for a living?’ In some towns, the answer ‘unemployed hedge-fund manager’ would have received a cheer. Not in Tunbridge Wells. This was like their pit closures.

  The lowest point of the night, however, was The Whale. From very early on in the gig, somebody was making a keening ‘wooo’ sound from the middle of the room. The first time I noticed it I presumed it was that ‘Ooh – get you’, slightly shocked noise that some audience members make to demonstrate loudly to the people around them that they think a joke is rude. That noise drives comics up the wall, incidentally. Actual shock will get either silence or a delayed boo. That ‘ooh’ noise is a fake, a loud, showy reaction that only succeeds in distracting the rest of the crowd. Rather than listen to the jokes, everyone else is going, ‘Is this that shocking? It’s not, is it? Why is that other person so shocked? Am I a terrible person?’ and missing the next, not particularly shocking joke.

  Here, it didn’t even come after a risqué joke. The first ‘wooo’ happened after some piece of whimsy about Tonbridge and Tunbridge and just kept going, intermittently popping up and floating around the room. Under stage lights, I could only see the first three rows anyway, and it was impossible to pin down where the noise came from. ‘Woooo!’ while I was doing the set-up to the joke. ‘Wooo!’ just after the punchline. ‘Woooo!’ while we discussed the drain-cleaning properties of bubbles.

  ‘Is there a whale in the room,’ I eventually asked, ‘or is it just me? You can all hear that, can’t you? Or am I like the Sixth Sense for whales? Do the ghosts of dead whales in the Tunbridge area want me to settle unfinished business for them?’

  After the laughter died down, the ‘wooo’ noise happened again, and the audience roared.

  ‘Oh, so it isn’t just me. So it’s a living whale. So… who brought Shamu to the gig?’

  And we had a great old time discussing how a whale would settle into Tunbridge Wells, whether Tonbridge would then get a whale of their own and how much whale material I could do in the second half. It was a proper piece of off-thecuff silliness, a fast-evolving private joke between me and Tunbridge Wells, and it got me to the interval in great form.

  During the break, Damon knocked on the dressing-room door.

  ‘That went well, didn’t it?’ I grinned.

  ‘Yeah, well we’ve just had someone knock on the stage door,’ he said sheepishly, ‘and they’ve asked if you could stop picking on the mentally handicapped guy.’

  All I remember from the second half was completely ignoring all the noises from the crowd, which was confusing to most of the audience, who didn’t know what I did now, and too little too late for the portion of the crowd who had known all along and probably presumed I had too and so thought I was a heartless prick. The show, and the tour, whimpered to an end. If there were any neat conclusions to be drawn, I couldn’t think straight to see them, other than not choosing yet another affluent-southern-suburb gig at which to finish the tour.

  At the stage door, there were two young lads who had driven over from Bishop’s Stortford, almost the opposite side of London, to see the show. I stood chatting as long as I possibly could so that they could at least say, ‘Well, he was chatty afterwards. He may have only looked interested in the show when he could use it to pick on a mentally handicapped guy, but he was very friendly afterwards.’

  I waved them off and then Damon drove me home.

  Dublin Vicar Street (the previous weekend)

  1 mobile-phone salesman (I think)

  2 people in IT (probably)

  3 other people in finance (possibly)

  Basically it was a standard night in Dublin apart from…

  Sean, who played semi-professional football for local club Shelbourne

  I’d already had the perfect ending to a show; I shouldn’t be selfish. Even while the tour was criss-crossing Britain, I was making guerrilla trips over to Dublin, playing my favourite room and picking up extra gigs along the way. Eventually we reached thirty-four shows in the Irish capital, the last of which, a few days before that night in Tunbridge Wells, is the one worth sharing.

  Sean was the first person I spoke to, sitting front and centre. He was nineteen, and rightly proud that, amongst the usual collection of smart professionals with suited jobs in banking and telecommunications, he was kicking a ball for a living:

  ‘Are you good at it?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, but nicely, not brashly.

  ‘If we got you a ball, could you do keepy-uppys all through the finale?’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’ He was even more eager about that suggestion.

  The show continued, with me making the odd reference to the ball-juggling we’d all be enjoying later: ‘Get yourself warmed up there, Sean, we don’t want you tearing any hamstrings later,’ that sort of thing.

  I thought it was a nicely silly joke and hadn’t given it any serious consideration until the head bouncer came into the dressing room during the interval.

  ‘Listen, Dara,’ he explained. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for this football.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘No, no. It’s just very difficult to find anywhere that’s open on a Sunday night.’

  ‘Jesus, don’t worry about it, it was just a bit of messing around.’

  ‘Well, one of the lads has gone into the flats behind the theatre and is knocking on doors. If we get anything, we can let you know before the encore.’

  Now I was getting giddy. If that was the effort being put in, then I should set this up.

  ‘If you get a ball,’ I said, ‘leave it just behind the curtain.’

  I went out for the second half.

  ‘Sorry, Sean, I know you probably thought we were kidding about, but we’ve scoured the city looking for a ball. It’s a Sunday night, though, and there isn’t one to be found. No encore appearance tonight.’

  Sean seemed a little disappointed, but the audien
ce had clearly just presumed that I was joking the whole time and didn’t seem too surprised. We settled into the second half, and I was able to enjoy it, in that demob-happy way you often get on a last night, telling the stories for the final time. I was also able to share the accumulation of all the great audience stories I’d heard throughout the tour: the Solero man in Oxford, the telly psychic getting her comeuppance in Belfast, the Rolls-Royce worker firing chickens into an engine in Bridlington; all these stories, all the way back to the first crime story about the meat cleaver and the carving knife in Warwick University Arts Centre eight months earlier. The show had grown richer and heavier with all this extra material, and tonight I shared it all with the last Dublin crowd. We must have been there for at least an extra half-hour before I wrapped it up with a ‘Thank you very much and good night!’

  Now, they know I’m coming back for an encore. Everyone comes back for an encore. Comedy crowds won’t hang around waiting as long as rock crowds, though, so you usually walk off, disappear behind the curtain, turn on your heel and walk straight out again. It’s such a ludicrous ritual that I had taken, by the end of the tour, to not even walking back to the curtain. ‘You know what I’m going to do now?’ I’d declare to the crowd.

  ‘I’m going to say a big goodbye and then walk all the way to behind that curtain, count to two and then come out again. What do you say we just pretend I’ve done that, and I’ll stay and stop wasting your time.’

  On this last night in Dublin, however, I made the walk back, wishing, wishing all the way back. Please let it be there, please let it be there. I was like a child on Christmas morning. And when I got behind the curtain, there it was. Sitting behind the drapes, blue and black, a child’s football. Not some regulation ball like a nineteen-year-old semi-professional athlete would be used to, but that soft football you’d give a six-year-old so he wouldn’t hurt his toes kicking it on the beach. I hardly had time to wonder what the bouncers had said to some parent on a Sunday night to get their child’s ball off them.

  I turned around and walked out again, the ball under my arm. When they saw it, the audience roared. Sean was up out of his chair. I walked out slowly and held the ball aloft.

  ‘We have a ball.’

  Sean had to be physically restrained from vaulting on to the stage.

  ‘Relax, champ, not just yet.’

  I did the usual encore material, which all felt different because I had a football under my arm. I thanked the IT people we’d spoken to, got them a round of applause. I thanked the banking and finance and mobile-telephony people, got them some applause as well. I particularly thanked the venue staff and the bouncers, and told the crowd how we’d got the ball, so they got a massive round of applause. And then I leaned over to Sean.

  ‘You’re on.’

  Sean was up on the stage in a leap.

  ‘This is the plan,’ I announced. ‘Sean here will juggle the ball as I make my run from the back of the stage. As I get to the front, Sean will lob it over to me, I catch it with my right, it goes flying into the crowd, huge ovation, we all go home. Right?’

  Sean nods.

  I walk to the back of the stage.

  ‘Now, don’t fuck this up, Sean, we only get one shot to make this work.’

  Sean is already playing keepy-uppys and paying me no attention.

  ‘All right, here goes.’

  I start to run in slow-mo towards the front of the stage. Sean is juggling the ball smoothly. As I approach the lip of the stage, I go, ‘Seeeaaaannn’. He lifts the ball over to me. But the ball is light; it’s going too far and too high. It crosses my chest and begins to drop on to my left side. I have to shift my weight on to my right leg, correct my stance and spin myself round. I connect with the left leg, solidly, but instead of shooting out into the crowd, the ball goes straight up, high into the lighting gantry, where it disappears from sight. Now, a thousand people are staring at the ceiling, as above them the ball must be pinballing around the fittings and scaffold.

  We all wait for the reappearance of the ball. There is enough time for me to wonder what we’ll do if it gets wedged or trapped and we never see it again. Not just what we’ll say to the crowd; but what we’ll say to the six-year-old whose ball it is.

  An age passes when, suddenly, above row three, the ball emerges. It drops at a stately pace and a woman rises from her chair to meet it and catches it with both hands above her head.

  The room erupts again.

  A million funny lines jostle in my head, but this isn’t the time for any of them. This is a moment that should be left to speak for itself; if you broke this with a gag you’d ruin it.

  The woman throws the ball to me.

  ‘Give her a round of applause.’ They do.

  And, turning to my accomplice. ‘And give it up for Sean.’ Massive applause.

  And as Sean steps off the stage, ‘And one last time’ – holding it aloft – ‘the ball!’ A massive explosion of noise.

  Then quietly, and finally, ‘I’ve been Dara O Briain. Thank you and good night.’

  And I bow and walk off to the best ovation of the tour.

  Because sometimes it doesn’t matter how great your material is. Sometimes all the time in the world spent honing routines and shaping one-liners and fashioning gags – it doesn’t matter. Sometimes they just want to see a man kick a child’s ball in the air.

  And if that doesn’t make any sense to you – well, you had to be there.

  Chapter 20:

  In Summation

  If you’ve got this far, one thing should have shone through, other than the excellence of the theatres in England and that you should go and see Ken Dodd live sometime.

  It’s that all these discussions about national character, all the generalizations, the aspirational lists and the averaging out to define the English Everyman; all this is a lot less instructive, and a lot less funny, than just talking to individuals and hearing what stories they have to tell. The entire national-characteristics ‘industry’ and, with it, the army of columnists, opinion writers and professional nostalgia-peddlers who are their fellow travellers, are missing the point. What is interesting to us is not the similarity, but the difference. It’s the unexpected and diverse that piques our interest, much more so than having our own lives reflected back on to us.

  If there is such a thing as national characteristics, certainly from where I stand, onstage with a microphone in my hand, it’s really only a collection of shared cultural reference points. Let me use that Tayto story to explain. Apologies to the Irish, who have probably heard me tell it a million times. And please don’t pay any attention to the word ‘(Beat)’ that crops up a few times. I’ll explain why it’s there later. So here’s the story. And it’s all true, by the way:

  A number of years ago, I was doing the after-dinner speech at the Irish Grocers Association Christmas dinner. It was a room filled with representatives from all the major brands. There was a Denny’s table. A Kilmeaden table. A Yoplait table. (Beat)

  I know, I know. Get me and my sexy celebrity life.

  Anyway, I did the speech and was mingling with the crowd when a man pushed through to me and introduced himself as Mick, from Tayto crisps. (Beat)

  ‘Hello, Mick,’ say I.

  ‘Hello, Dara,’ says Mick. ‘I hear you’re living in London now.’

  ‘I am, Mick,’ says I, ‘I’ve been living in London a couple of years now.’

  And Mick leans in and says, ‘You must miss the Tayto something terrible.’ (Beat)

  And I looked at his little face and didn’t want to disappoint him, so I said, ‘Oh, I do, Mick, I do. More than my family. More than my friends. More than the summer sunshine on the Wicklow Mountains…’ (trails off in reverie)

  Mick looks at me, and just says, ‘Wait there.’

  And then he runs out of the hotel ballroom, out through the hotel lobby, into the hotel car park, opens the boot of his car and takes something out, runs back through the hotel car park, runs throu
gh the hotel lobby, works his way through the hotel ballroom until he finds me again; and then presents me with a box of forty-eight packets of Tayto cheese and onion crisps. (Beat)

  Now, what I may have forgotten to mention was that this was a black-tie event. I was standing in a tux, trying to look like something out of Ocean’s Eleven, and now I had a giant box of crisps under my arm.

  It’s difficult to carry off suave, to look all James Bond, when you’re carrying four dozen packets of cheese and onion.

  I had to weave my way out of that room, past all the tables, the Denny table, the HB table, the Pat the Baker table (beat) knowing that, as I walked out, the box of crisps under my arm, they were all looking at me going, ‘Look at the fat bastard. Had to get a box of crisps for himself. Probably wouldn’t have even done the gig if there weren’t some crisps for him at the end. They probably had to lure him on to the stage with a trail of Kimberley (beat) and Mikado (beat)… C’mon, you fat prick, get up here, there’ll be crisps afterwards…’

  Let’s take a quick break from the story.

  As you might have guessed, the word ‘(beat)’ indicates where I had to take a pause, but specifically where I had to take a pause because of the audience laughing when I told the story in Ireland, but not in England. Where I’ve written ‘(beat)’ are the points where an English crowd just didn’t recognize that there was a laugh meant to be there. As you can also see, it’s usually after an iconic Irish brand name. They aren’t ancient old brand names, like some sort of fake nostalgia thing (hey, does everyone remember Spangles?!). They are all current Irish grocery products, whose place in the firmament anyone would recognize.