The Irish Are Coming. Ryan Tubridy

to it and they have a great tradition of it so it’s essentially like playing in the Premier League.’

      The road to Britain was smooth with no concerns over potential obstructions like accents. The path had been well trod by Dave Allen, Dylan Moran was on the circuit, and Graham Norton already had his own irreverent chat show (see Chapter 3), so Irish comedians were welcome and not lost in translation. One of the most striking things about Dara O Briain is that, unlike Dave Allen, he didn’t invent a new name for himself. Causing difficulty even for a home audience, it’s a name few would have predicted would be rolling off the tongues of the British audiences who flock to his shows. And, in fact, back in 2006 Dara explained: ‘Darby Brown, Dazzy B, Dusky Benderson … Don’t think that I don’t spend all day running through the incredible showbiz career I might have if I just ditched my own name.’ He told me: ‘It’s easier to become well known with a name like Jack Dee or Alan Carr or Jimmy Carr or Jo Brand. They’re all short, punchy names as opposed to some big convoluted thing!’ But to his credit, Dara has always done things a little differently.

      Things really kicked off in the UK in 2003 when Dara took the helm of Live Floor Show on BBC Two. This was followed swiftly by a guest appearance as host of Have I Got News for You. After that, everything started to happen and in between countless gigs at venues all over Ireland and the UK, Dara was fronting shows like Mock the Week and partaking in popular series such as Three Men in a Boat, which saw him reconstruct the famous novel with Griff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath.

      The material he chose for his stage show was quite different from Dave Allen’s day. There are very few Church-related gags in Dara’s repertoire, although he’ll still have a poke at authority figures such as politicians or bankers. The shadow of the Troubles was receding when he got to Britain in the late 1990s: ‘We arrived at the point where the worst effect it had on me is the time I couldn’t find a bin on the Tube and a bloke said “Oh, that’ll be because of your lot.”’ He learned to do his terrorism joke first, so it was out of the way and the audience relaxed – and also because it was very easy laughs. ‘There is a weird notion that terrorism is a difficult thing to write about. It’s the f**king easiest thing because the tension is already there so if you address it anyway, you release that tension and you get a laugh. We got credit for a darkness and a depth that we did not deserve.’ But now, post-peace process, it’s history; there’s no comedy in it any more.

      The only major consideration for the twenty-first-century Irish comedian is how Irish or how British his material can or shall be. Most comedy can be universal but in Ireland we’ll munch a packet of Tayto rather than Walkers crisps, and if you’re talking politics most British people don’t know how to pronounce Taoiseach, never mind have a clue who the latest one is. Dara gigs in both countries and he’ll riff about the same type of subjects but just change the Irishness of the references as appropriate. He’s one of life’s comedy riffers. You can throw anything at him and he’ll riff away, like the perfect jazz guitarist in a band.

      Broadly speaking, he’s an observational comic, looking at life today. He’s not looking at Ireland as a country or playing up being an Irish lad in the UK – even though he’s possibly the proudest Irishman of all the émigrés in this book. He was brought up to speak fluent Irish, in a very Irish household, and you can sense the Irishness in his bones. As a prolific tweeter, he allows his fans (and naysayers) close to him in a technological sense and, on occasion, this has allowed detractors to criticize him if he says anything that they deem un-Irish. Dara reckons ‘It is generally a bedroom Republican, it’s teenage nationalists going “Ahh, I thought you were Irish.” I did find if you transferred the language to Irish, it ends quite quickly.’

      It’s a good ploy when challenging a critic of one’s Irishness to simply ‘out-Irish’ them with a passing phrase in the mother tongue. But this type of criticism does rankle with Dara, who says, ‘I think it’s exceptionally rude, particularly in a time of more emigration, to turn around to anyone’s that emigrated and say “You’re not Irish now.” I think it’s an immature trait.’

      When we met in London for the purposes of this book, we talked at length about the Irish in Britain and Dara said the move wasn’t so dramatic for him as it was for generations before him. As he settled into his new home he found that the Irish had assimilated into British society and weren’t seen as different any more. ‘Cheap flights and access to the country just wiped that out … if anything, you have to remind them that you’re Irish.’

      Up to this point, those who conquered the UK did so while being defined by their Irishness. Dara was the first man for whom it really doesn’t matter. He’d be funny if he was Scottish or Dutch or Kazakhstani. However, that doesn’t mean that he has forsaken his nationality or sense of loyalty to Ireland. Listening to him talk, I get the sense that he has a recalibrated patriotism that allows him to rule Britannia and honour Hibernia at the same time:

      Because I work so often in Ireland I’m still quite Irish in some ways. [Graham] Norton has assimilated better. He’ll appear in the Radio Times in a Union Jack waistcoat to do the Eurovision, which I would find uncomfortable, I’d find that weird. I tweet about following Ireland in the football and on Mock the Week I still talk about ‘your’ football team even though, nominally it’s ‘our’ government because I live here and pay my taxes.

      I tried him with the critical question: who does he support when he watches the World Cup? As part of his recalibrated patriotism, Dara has no time for those who shout for whomever England happen to be playing against: ‘You kind of have to lose that here [in the UK] because it’s emotionally perverse to wish ill on your loved ones and friends that they should be unhappy. I don’t cheerlead for the English football team but I’m not basking in their misery.’

      Always in demand for his brand of what he describes as ‘frippery, quippery and off-the-cuffery’, Dara is ensconced in Britain as a permanent fixture on television and the comedy circuit. It’s been an odd route but he got there. As he said in 1999, ‘given my education, I really should be a teacher in Carlow Institute of Technology or somewhere, teaching first years how to differentiate’. Mathematics’ loss has been comedy’s gain, so it all adds up in the end.

      * * *

      We’ve got many other stand-up comedians who’ve crossed the water but the three comics I’ve covered in this chapter are, for me, the ones who’ve really raised themselves above the rest – and Allen and O Briain were especially ground-breaking. We’ve noted the progression over thirty years of comedy from addressing Irishness and seeing the funny side of things like Catholic guilt through to not giving it so much as a passing mention. From feeling a need to lighten the atmosphere by cracking an Irish terrorist joke through to cracking jokes about the terrorism in England. From lightbulb jokes about dumb paddies through to Dara O Briain, who’s by far the cleverest man in comedy on either side of the Irish Sea.

      One thing the comedians I’ve chosen have in common (and this is true of most Irish comics) is that their material is not about jokes, it’s about telling stories or just talking. In Ireland, one of the things we do better than anyone else is talk. We have a certain flair when it comes to words, a love of vocabulary and quirky turns of phrase. The gift of the gab, the blarney, call it what you will, is one of our national traits. That’s why it’s hardly surprising we’ve made a name for themselves in the UK in jobs where chatting is a prerequisite. And that’s why the Irish have given the UK quite so many of the household names I’ll talk about in the next chapter, ‘The Chat Show Hosts’ …

       3

       THE CHAT SHOW HOSTS

      THE MINUTE MICHAEL PARKINSON comes on television you can tell he is a Yorkshireman, while the Davids – Dimbleby and the late Frost – sound a