THE SECRET GIG

The secret gig is on Tuesday next.  It will feature David McWilliams, the new host.  It will feature one comedian who hasn’t done the show before, one who has done it a lot, and a couple who haven’t done it very often.  The guests are one person who is political but with a sesne of fun, and one person who is from the more flamboyant end of the fashionistas.

If you’ve already got tickets, you’ll know where and when.  If you haven’t, then tough.  It wouldn’t be a secret gig if we told you about it.

It will also feature David McWilliams’s new mug.

And we might try out our new gameshow element.  Or we might not.

Comedy on TV #7536

People who don’t know what they’re doing with comedy on TV are like kids with a paintbox but no talent for art.  They think if you mix two pretty colours together, you’ll get another pretty colour.  But that’s not always true.  Mostly you get a sort of a muddy colour.  Or you get beige.

BARACK

Barack Obama.  Nobel Peace Prize.

That was quick.

not being funny or anything.

Just saying….

It was quick.

O’DONOGHUE

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!BASTARD!!!!  BASTARD!!!!  Why did he go?  Nooooo…why did he have to go?  Everywhere I look, EVERYWHERE, for MONTHS, there have been political correspondents writing thinkpieces regretting that “we don’t have a resigning culture” in Ireland.  That politicians can get away with anything, from raiding the cookie jar to knocking the Child of Prague of the mantelpiece, and not resign.  Whereas in the upstanding, stiff upper lip, sorry-old-boy-you’ve-got-to-take-a-bullet-for-the-school UK, if they so much as put a hotel charge to view an artistic movie celebrating the beauty of the human form on their expenses, it’s goodnight nurse.

And what happens?  What happens THREE WEEKS before we get on air?  He ups and does the decent thing.  Couldn’t he have hung on?  What’s got into these people?  Have our politicians lost the sense of moral superiority and entitlement that made this country great?  Were they not relishing the thought of ignoring every sorty we carried out on their flanks?

Then again, it could be fear. He’s had a lot on his mind.  He might only have realised quite recently, at 10 o’clock the other night, for instance, that we were coming back in November, and that it was entirely possible that the Panelistas might tear him apart with their razor sharp satirical barbs.  In the same way that Jason Lee never really recovered from Frank Skinner and David Baddiel ripping into his notorious pineapple haircut, John O’Donoghue may have realised that he could survive newspaper exposes, he could tap dance past a dozen Oireachtas committees, but he would never recover from a salvo of withering putdowns from the most bad-ass topical humourists in the country.  Could that be it?  Did we strike fear into his heart?  Did he think…I remember what they did to McDowell…I can’t face that.  Anything but that…and retire into his study to do the decent thing with the old service revolver?

Because if other politicians lose their sense of affrontery and brazen arrogance in such an ignoble and snivelling manner..we’re screwed.

So, if you’re reading this, Tanaiste – and we know you can’t keep those gorgeous beady little peepers off us, you gorgeous little fox, you – you’re doing fine.  Some of the others are going to be roadkill, but we like you.  We’d never say a bad word about you.  You are a Very Cute Tanaiste.  And Taoiseach, keep up the good work.  This is a time for leaders with charisma and backbone, and you’ve got both in spades.  Stick it out.  Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.

AN OFFICE FULL OF RESEARCHERS CONVULSED WITH MIRTH

We’re hardened comedy veterans here.  Well, maybe not hardened, and mostly not veterans.  But this has tears of joy streaming down our cheeks. you may have seen stuff a few months ago about a man trying to pay a bill with a drawing of a spider. If not -

http://www.geekologie.com/2008/11/good_idea_man_submits_drawing.php

He’s back.  This time some poor guy who carried out a management company inspection of his apartment…

http://www.27bslash6.com/grubby.html

It’s like a perverse and beautiful art form.

SOMETHING YOU DON’T SEE EVERY DAY

We’ve all been watching this really rather good short in the office.  It’s an incredibly simple, but absorbing film in which a director sat in a lift in a tower block, and filmed the people who lived there.  It was made in 2001, and hasn’t really aged.  There’s an awful lot of stuff on TV which is described as documentary, which is led by talking heads and voiceover.  There’s a lot of stuff which relies on sensationalistic tabloid type stories, or on pointing at people and sneering under the guise of being “observational”.  Nothing wrong with being observational or using voiceover (there’s plenty of voiceover in a David Attenborough film) but at the risk of being controversial there’s also a lot of lazy film-making around which uses these things as a crutch rather than a tool.  This is not that.  It’s real observation, and real storytelling, done with real skill, and with a tenderness and affection for his subjects that you don’t always see in a world of shock docs about My Manboobs and Me, or The Boy with Two Heads.

Have a look…

http://www.4docs.org.uk/films/show/12/The+Lift

Went all serious for a minute.  don’t know what came over me.

THE LLAMAS

There are times when I wish above wishing that we were on air.  This week would have been one of those weeks anyway, with the Tanaiste have an all-thumbs day or two, this great photo of the FAS executives

Expenses? We had an expense account???

and the Lisbon Referendum.  OK, maybe not the Lisbon Referendum.  But the saga of the llamas started as a good vehicle for one-liners, and has escalated in text book fashion.  First they get loose on the Red Cow roundabout, then they get rounded up and impounded by the Gardai, then the owner claims they are being held to ransom.  And now…NOW they’ve escaped.  What were the Gardai thinking?  Did they not know that is the first duty of a captured Llama Officer to escape?  Did they not see them shaking the earth from the tunnel out of their woolly trousers?  Did they not wonder why they had taken to jumping over a vaulting horse?  Were there no security towers manned by gardai with machine guns? Where is Colin Murphy when we need him? Of course, there are problems – for one thing, I’m off to check our contract with RTE.  Because if it says anything about “a positive duty to deal with the subjects such as race, religion, politics, minorities, sexual relations, gender imbalance, sexuality and even the great unmentionables such as terminal illness and paedophilia”, we are SO screwed.

SEASON OF MISTS ETC….

A statue in Donegal has begun to weep. A woman has invented a bra which turns into a gas mask.  People have begun to send stories in and wish we were on air now to cover them: everything from Letterman fessing up to fraternising with the staff, to a girl in India who took out an invading paramilitary with his own AK47. We’ve had the annual chuckle over the Extreme Pumpkin site.  A group of dwarves have formed a community in a theme park and are living in mushroom houses.  Senior politicians have begun to take researchers to lunch and hint at impropriety in government over the Happy Meal.  There’s a hell planet which rains rocks unto molten lakes of lava.  The Gardai have won an Ig Nobel prize for issuing fifty summons to someone the same person – whose name happens to be Polish for Driving Licence.  We’ve found the world’s funniest sex columnist, a photographer who just takes pictures of people in the street who he thinks have great dress sense (and is now a guru to certain fashionistas). We’re having a referendum. Maple and sumach down this autumn ride.

THAT HOST IN FULL

You will have read in Sunday’s Papers that the new host of the show is David McWilliams.  We’re still trying to figure out whether we should send the Panel mug that we offered as a prize for a correct guess to either The Mail or The Tribune.  And yes, we are happy to confirm that the lovable tousle-headed urchin of economics is indeed the new sheriff in town.  Trouble is that already there’s nothing left to say on the matter.  He’s clearly the right man for the job, something we’ve been saying since he had a run-out on the training pitch last year.

The blats have already pointed out that he will be able to explain the difficult financial concepts that have reared their heads over the last year or so in terms that the likes of you and me can understand.  So we don’t need to say anything about that, except that we’d never heard of quantitative easing until the Tribune brought it up, and there’s now an office full of shit-scared researchers wondering what fresh hell they are about to be tipped into.

So we will say this: we have been searching for some time for a man who could challenge Maxwell’s sincerely held belief that the world economy is run by a small cabal of Presbyterian economists in an upstairs room somewhere in Edinburgh.

Ecce homo.

We already have his mug picked out.

THE TOMMY THING

The Tommy Tiernan Affair rumbles on.  I’d have thought that they’d have it out of their system by now, but today has seen two articles in the Irish Times, and one in the Indo.

Having stood close to “difficult” comedy a few times in the last twenty or so years, a few things occur to me.

First off, I don’t think Tommy Tiernan is a racist, or an anti-Semite, and I think anyone who looks at the interview on the Hot Press will see that for once, the catch all defence of being quoted “out of context” holds up.

Secondly, the comment from the press has been disappointingly facile.  The worst offender was the Sunday Tribune.  Consider this, from their editorial:

“Good comedy is, of course, all about being edgy and subversive, mocking widely held beliefs and holding a mirror up to ourselves so that we can confront uncomfortable realities we prefer to ignore.

There’s nothing wrong with a gag being offensive. And a good comedian has a positive duty to deal with subjects such as race, religion, politics, minorities, sexual relations, sexuality, gender balance and even the great unmentionables such as paedophilia and terminal illness.”

FlannO’Brien once said that there is no more patronising phrase in the English language than “of course”, and nothing in the two paragraphs detracts from the whiff of a pompous headmaster lecturing an unruly pupil – “I can take a joke with the next man, but…”

And the assumptions…”good comedy” has to be “edgy” and “subversive”.  O rly?  And a “good comedian” has a “duty” to deal with “difficult” subjects.  Are you SURE?  What does that make Dylan Moran?  Eddie Izzard? I’m not sure that they, or a hundred other genuinely excellent comics have ever cancelled a tour because the gender balance routine isn’t ready yet, or they’re concerned about shirking their duty to tackle terminal illness.

The only surprise is that word “satirical” didn’t find its way in their somehow.  Satirical is one of those words the dinnerparterati love, but which almost no-one in comedy actually ever uses.  It’s a word for people with no sense of what’s funny, which they use to justify indulging the mediocre.  The only example they can ever think of is Swift’s A Modest Proposal – written 280 years ago, but hell, it was on their Eng Lit reading list.  “Satirical” has become a lazy substitute for “topical”, or “about politicians”.  Someone – a fool, in fairness – described Nob Nation to me as “satire”.  Topical, sure.  Funny, sometimes, yes.  But satirical?  O rly?

It’s what comes next though, that is really worrying.  At a time when we’ve just seen a Defamation Act pass into which re-defines blasphemy in worryingly open terms, a liberal newspaper is recommending that the Gardai look at a transcript of the remarks.  There’s a full video available freely online, but hell, why should the Tribune know that?  They’re just journalists, they shouldn’t be expected to back up what they write with research.  Why should they look at what happened, and form a view?

There’s a tendency for people who don’t go out to watch comedy, or watch it regularly for fun – all those Vincent Browne programmes to improve the mind with – but who have to accept that it forms part of popular culture, and they should have a view on it.  It is to validate what is essentially a reflex action in terms of relevance, topicality, and commentary. A bit like explaining Leo Messi by using an anatomical diagram.

Sometimes, having a justification for putting something on television or a stage is important.  There are things comedians do which strain at the boundaries of taste and political orthodoxy.  But don’t tell me on the one hand that it’s their duty, list (almost) every taboo as a fit topic for comedy, then rail at one exception.  Which happens to be the one we’re talking about.

Finally, all of this ignores something which has been true in comedy for a long time.  That is, where a lot of controversial comedy is concerned, the reaction is part of the work itself.  The ripples are as important as the stone.  Consider Lenny Bruce.  Listen to Lenny Bruce today, and he isn’t very funny.

(Pause.  Look up.  Sky hasn’t fallen in.  Continue.)

I don’t think he’s that funny, anyway.  In his time though, he was very important, and the outrage he provoked, the arrests, the newspaper headlines – they were as much a part of the show as the man on the stage with the microphone.  If everyone had nodded sagely to each other, and murmured, “gosh, he’s got a point” it wouldn’t have been quite the same. When Chris Morris made Brass Eye, the howl of outrage from purple faced celebrities and politicians who had been duped into endorsing half-assed charity campaigns, and spouting nonsense about ridiculous scientific claims, all in an effort to look good, was as much a part of the programme as the videotapes from which they were transmitted.

And so with Tommy and the Jews.  I can give you an argument either way for whether he should have said it, and I’ve changed my mind as often as I’ve changed my socks since the piece hit the papers.  But I think now the reaction is more illuminating than the interview, which was meant to be about people being intolerant of a comedian telling a joke.  Apart from Ian O’Doherty quoting a fine Sarah Silverman joke to prove that you can make a Holocaust joke and still be funny, I don’t think the sum total of human understanding has been increased.

Notorious radical firebrand bad girl comedienne, errm Victoria Wood once said that “if it’s funny it’s in good taste.”  But she probably doesn’t know about her duty to be edgy and subversive.

So maybe the Tribune’s right: we should fight for the journalist’s right to  protect her terrorist sources, and jail the comedian.

Of course, I don’t think Suzanne Breen should have had to reveal her sources.  But then I don’t think that Tommy Tiernan’s a racist.  I’m not sure many people do.  As the funniest thing on TV just now* would say:

Simples.

SC

(*or it would be the funniest thing on TV, if it discharged its positive duty to deal with race, religion, politics, minorities, sexual relations, sexuality, gender balance and even the great unmentionables such as paedophilia and terminal illness. Which is tough, when you’re a meerkat.  But them’s the rules.)