The science of comedy

Barry Egan meets Dara O Briain

He is one of Britain’s most popular TV stars. And one of the most complex. In his most extraordinary interview to date, Dara O Briain tells Barry Egan about the eternal verities he learned from an exotic dancer in Australia; his wife falling asleep at — not on — Harold Pinter; the Irish in London being the new establishment, and the death of comedy

Dara O Briain is due onstage in Vicar Street in an hour. He is always on the road.

“But what am I running from?” he asks. “That is the question.”

Is comedy a form of therapy for you? I ask. “No,” he says, “because I don’t do much deep-diving in terms of my personality onstage.”

Do comedians need to have two notebooks on ethics to hand when they perform now because the world is so primed to take offence?

“No. It is less than you imagine. It didn’t enormously affect me because I was never one of these people who was deliberately trying to skate a line; like I am far more likely to talk about things I have fucked up in my life, or do arguments about things that are scientific, than I am trying to get that response off an audience,” Dara says, possibly meaning Frankie Boyle telling jokes about Katie’s Price’s disabled child, Jerry Sadowitz calling Nelson Mandela something that rhymes with punt, or Jimmy Carr’s gags about gypsies.

“So, it wasn’t like I had to do it differently,” he says. “Obviously at some point I will probably fuck something up in some way I can’t even anticipate now.” I ask Dara what he has fucked up in his life. “Fucked up? I can’t think of anything epically I have fucked up. You mean when I said that the shows are about things I have fucked up? It’s more misdemeanour or misadventure, rather than pouring my heart out because ‘I have no relationship with my auntie.’ I’ve very little to give in terms of anything broken that makes me do this, and have an emotional need to be out there. Actually, I clearly have an emotional need to be out there.” And what drives that emotional need? “You want the love of strangers.” You want their laughter? “Yeah. You want the validation of that.” And it’s the same with the audience. You are. externalising something in them and making it universal.

“There is definitely a case of you talking to them about their lives via your own,” Dara says. “Stand-up tends to be about some facets of ordinary life. ‘Haven’t you seen this? Haven’t you noticed this? Isn’t it also the same of you? Isn’t that a thing that you also recognised?’”

But whether it is dark or light in comedy, it has to be funny to work.

“The flip side of that is,” Dara says, “that the biggest and most talked about show at the moment is Nanette by Hannah Gadsby.”

As Moira Donegan put it in the The New Yorker, Hannah Gadsby is the comedian “forcing stand-up to confront the #MeToo era.”

“Nanette,” says Dara, “is basically a comic saying: as a gay woman I have told stories which I have made funny because I have not told you what actually happened, and that is false. And I’m going to stop doing it now, because what happened is much more unsettling and will make you angry. And I actually want to tell those stories now.”

“It is amazing to watch and she does it brilliantly, but obviously everyone went: ‘Ahhhh — all comedy is dead now!’ It obviously is not. But this was enormously [important] because it allowed people to have this confessional thing. I don’t have a particularly confessional thing that I want to do that is as angry as that... at the moment. Who knows? What can go wrong?”

“You can do it as a form where you are expressly going: ‘This is not expressly funny. I am not here to entertain you,’” Dara explains. And that matters to you, I say. “It matters to me because the shows that I do, [entertaining people] is the ultimate aim of them.”

Dara adds that his show is: “Oh fuck, structured like you wouldn’t believe.” He has a giant, eight-foot-tall white board with arrows going from one joke to another at home in west London. He plans every part of his shows out in complex detail.

“It is intuitive. It is like putting together a piece of music where it builds up at certain points. There is a whole energy movement that has to take place in my stand-up show,” he says.

Dara had a compelling conversation once with an exotic dancer in a bar in Perth. He said to her that he presumed she had a routine. To which she replied, “Like a dance for somebody? Oh, totally.”

“Obviously at some point I will probably fuck something up in some way I can’t even anticipate now”

“Then,” recalls Dara with an uproarious laugh, “she listed it off for me: ‘Bum-face. Boob-face. Bum-face. Boob-face. Vag-face. Bum-face. Boob-face.’”

“I thought that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard in my life,” Dara confesses. “I had this conversation once with the director Paul Greengrass. He was talking about putting together the Bourne movies. He was talking about the start, and then you have the movement, and I had to go, ‘I’m sorry, Paul but...’ And so any conversation I ever have with someone in the creative arts comes down to: ‘Bum-face. Boob-face. Bum-face. Boob-face.Vag-face. Bum-face. Boob-face.’”

“So, all art, there is a rhythm,” Dara adds. “I don’t apply bum-face, boob-face, bum-face, boob-face, vag-face, bum-face, boob-face’. It is a retrospective tool. It’s like Kurt Vonnegut used to draw graphs of stories: when the story goes up, it’s a positive bit, then the story goes down, then there is another positive bit and the story goes up.”

“When you do a stand-up show there is a punchy bit at the start then more information, then more punchy bit. You have to measure it out and give your audience a chance to breathe and come back in again, building up to a big finale,” he says.

“There are some people who take this very seriously, when essentially what you are doing is bum-face, boob-face, vag-face, bum-face and then a big finale boob-face, and there is an epilogue which is vag-face. It is the Rosetta Stone for all art. It makes perfect sense. In classical music, in shows, you can’t just go foot down. We have a natural rhythm in our heads.”

In 2015, Dara interviewed Stephen Hawking for a documentary on BBC. In it, the great professor, who had a slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease, said how he was sad he could no longer hold his children and that he was often lonely because people were afraid to talk to him.

Butterfly effect

When Dara asked him about black holes in space, Hawking told him that jumping into a black hole would have fatally unpleasant consequences and went on to rule out time travel. Asked now if he could travel back in time to his teenage self what would he say to him, Dara says that he “tried to write a routine about that once and I mused a bit about it onstage. It never became a killer routine.

Genuinely, I would be petrified, because I would think that if I did anything, it would slightly alter everything, in that chaotic butterfly effect, and it would make my children disappear, in a puff. And they would be gone, like in Back to the Future,” says Dara. “Yet there is part of me would like to go back and see just how dull it was on Sunday afternoon in Bray in 1984.”

It wasn’t quite that dull. There was an afternoon on a train in Dublin when he was 14. Dara was reading a book by Woody Allen, when two women got on and started a conversation.

‘Oh, that’s a beautiful coat. Where did you get that?’ one asked. ‘Oh, I got this in Aqua Scrotum,’ the other answered. At 14, Dara found the two words ‘Aqua Scrotum’ so funny that he had to hold up the Woody Allen book and pretend that he was laughing at something he’d read — “and not at the fact she thought the name of the shop was Aqua Scrotum and not [the fashion label] Aquascutum.”

What drew him to the books of Woody Allen as a teenager?

“I was a comedy fan, but not in a ‘someday I am going to do that,’” says Dara, now 46 years of age and doing very much doing that for a living on TV shows like

Mock the Week, The Panel, and The Apprentice: You’re Fired!

and many others, as well as endless sold-out stand-up shows around the world.

“If you go to the humorous writing section, there is a lot of 101 Uses For A Dead Cat-type rubbish as well, and every so often there will be a David Sedaris or Woody Allen or Spike Milligan. There isn’t a great deal of written comedy books that are laugh-out-loud funny.”

You are a fan of Philip Roth. Did you find his books funny?

“I remember picking up Portnoy’s Complaint and going, ‘This is going to be funny.’ Portnoy’s Complaint, for me, flipped all the way over into being sad. And I read the whole book as sad.” Did he ever meet Roth? “Oh God, Jesus, no. You see, that’s the kind of circle that you wouldn’t really cross over into from doing this.”

Is it true your wife once fell asleep on Harold Pinter’s shoulder?

“Er... I’ve tightened it [the story] up! He was there [in the theatre], but he wasn’t sitting beside us. You could list most of the [Olivier-nominationed plays] that someone fell asleep at at some point. Nicole Kidman as Rosalind Franklin in Photograph 51 [at the Noel Coward Theatre in London in September, 2015]... yep, slept through the first half of that!” So it wasn’t at a dinner party with Pinter? “Oh, God, no. We were at a show and she had come from work. The whole point was, I would say it on stage to absolve the audience: ‘Lads, you’re in a theatre. It’s dark. You’re sitting in red velvet seats — some of you may fall asleep.’ We had a nice sleepy moment in Derry when a guy, front row, was properly gone, conked out, head back, lolling.”

“We watched this for an hour; the show went great with the extra fun of ‘this man has slept through the entire second half.’ I asked everyone at the end to just tip-toe out and we all agreed to do it and then the fucker woke up! That now is my new ambition if someone falls asleep at one of my shows: we will all tip-toe out and meet in the lobby where I will say goodbye to everyone there,” says Dara, who is here to promote, Secret Science: The Amazing

World Beyond Your Eyes, his second book for young people.

Flash Gordon

As a kid on Saturday mornings, he ran around in the garden with a colander on his head for a space helmet pretending to Flash Gordon — because “our entertainment options were relatively low.”

He recalls a teacher when he was 14 talking about space and relativity and black holes and getting into science. He read In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat by John Gribbin, Chaos:

Making A New Science by James Gleick and the aforesaid Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

Was Dara up Bray Head at 14 with a telescope imagining he was Galileo discovering the cosmos?

“No. The light pollution is so bad in Bray that it is impossible to see anything.”

When he went to mass as a kid, did he feel science was incompatible with faith in God?

“I wasn’t having any massive internal debates. The non-belief I have just came from, ‘I’m not getting anything off this.’ People presume you’re atheist because you have rationally killed God or you have reasoned him out of existence. I just don’t [believe.] I look into my heart and I just don’t get it.” He says that, thankfully, looking through a telescope into outer space and all that stuff supports the stance that his heart has led him to anyway.

Dara went to Colaiste Eoin in Booterstown, Co Dublin, which he describes as “in a really good way; an argumentative school,” adding, “if you were sending your kids to an all-Irish school in the 1970s it took some effect of will at home; it made for an interesting group of people to be around.”

Dara has a vivid memory of pupils filing back in for lunch after playing hurling and “an argument would take place about Northern Ireland, which was a rather hot topic at the time, and somebody dropping the hurley... and in the one motion addressing the argument before the hurley had even hit the ground. And so it was that kind of school.” Did Dara only speak Irish with his father at home? “Yes. And I still do. That remains the case. I come from the kind of home where Irish is, if not the first language, then the one-and-a-half language.”

Your father was a trade-union negotiator. He was also a choir master.

“He use to run various courses in Irish as part of an Irish language thing in the big church in Bray.” Did Dara get a theatrical sense from his father? “No, weirdly, I am not a particularly musical person; that seemed to skip a generation for me. I remember seeing him talk very comfortably in front of 800 people at these choral concerts or whatever. I remember being impressed by that.”

Dara moved to London from Dublin in 1999 and became, in time, hugely popular. He was dubbed, whether he liked it or not, ‘Terry Wogan’s heir apparent’ and Britain’s ‘favourite Irishman’.

I am curious about how he sees the Irish now in London. “If you had a conversation with anyone about privilege or race in London,” Dara explains, “the Irish would be regarded as part of the establishment. It is difficult to remind people that we are only whatever number of years from ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish.’”

There was the odd echo of racism when he first arrived in London all those years ago. “I remember saying to a guy on the Tube, ‘Oh, is there a bin around here?’ And the guy said, ‘No — thanks to your lot.’ That kind of weird thing would ever so often pop up.”

“But we have been normalised over there because we are very good at moving through society,” says Dara, who lives in west London with his wife and kids. In terms of his adopted hometown being this bastion of left-wing political correctness where everyone is looking to be offended by something, Dara says that some of the offence taken can be discarded.

“Take recently when Labour politician Chuka Umunna said something about Jeremy Corbyn to ‘call off the dogs’ and [Shadow Chancellor] John McDonnell said, ‘How dare he call the members of this party dogs!’ We all get that that is just manufactured, that that is just nonsensical outrage because you are just deliberately misunderstanding a turn of phrase.”

Britain’s former chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, recently called the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn a dangerous anti-Semite — citing Corbyn’s “Zionist” remarks as “the most offensive statement made by a senior British politician since Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.”

Soft left

Does Dara believe Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite?

“I think he has difficulties separating his views on Israel. As somebody said to me, Jeremy Corbyn has never had to run for election in his life because his life is in Islington and he has been able to be incredibly strident about what he believes because he is in an incredibly safe Labour seat. I think he is less good at tempering what he says. If you go back throughout the years of stuff — I’m sure he has said many things that now you go, ‘well…’, stripped of context.

“I have a slight sympathy for efforts to do the same thing for Israel and Palestine that were done here [in Ireland] in terms of being the people who legitimise political movements that were outside the pale and drawing them in and that process worked for us here and I can see the argument that he was doing that with Hamas, let’s say,” Dara says. “But I can also see that he has been very slow at just drawing a line of division between the perfectly valid criticisms of Israel’s government and what it does — those criticisms happen within Israel, for Christ’s sake, but no one is calling them anti-Semite.” He describes his own politics as “broadly soft-left.” “Or centrist dad!” laughs Dara, who in 2010, was voted 16th on Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Stand-Ups. He’d doubtlessly be way higher on that list now.

“When you write a show,” he says later, “you think, ‘How would I in the persona I have onstage react in this situation?’ So you kind of talk it out like you’re a sitcom character. With any good comic, they would know exactly how they would react if they fell in a swimming pool.”

And how would you react if you fell in a swimming pool?

“I’d just swim. Am I wearing a tux? Am I holding an expensive piece of snorkeling equipment? Or did I fall bum-first or vag-first or boob-first into the swimming pool?”

Secret Science: The Amazing World Beyond Your Eyes by Dara O’ Briain, is published by Scholastic in hardback on October 4. Dara is doing a signing in Eason on O’Connell St, D2, at 12 noon, Saturday, October 6. He plays Vicar Street, Dublin, on November 22, 23 and 24

“It is actually difficult to remind people that we are only whatever number of years from ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’”