CityLife

Interview: David O'Doherty

David O'Doherty

ISN'T technology great? With a little help from its illogical and unfathomable (to me anyway) magic, CityLife was able to catch up with last year’s If.comedy winner David O’Doherty on tour in Canada without having to hail a passing 747 or stow away on a cross-Atlantic steamer.

So how is the chilliest bit of the North American continent treating the Irishman? “Today is the coldest weather I have ever known. At this moment I am literally wearing all of the clothes I have with me,” he divulges.

Well, it saves carrying them about in a suitcase. “It’s fun,” he counters. “Five of us are doing a tour right across Canada for the Just For Laughs people. Everything is super-well organised. There are cars that take you to planes and people standing beside the planes with your name written on a sign spelled slightly wrong. I think after this I will be completely institutionalised, like someone who has been in prison for 40 years and doesn't remember how to put the milk on the Frosties.”

'Musical whimsy'

O’Doherty is probably the least likely person to succumb to the kind of mollycoddling lavished on the helpless celebrity. He’s about as far from the notion of vacuous glitterati as you can get. Though not greatly known outside of Ireland or the Edinburgh Fringe, O’Doherty is nevertheless one of the most respected comedy figures on the circuit, largely for his uncompromising lo-fi style. His is a set that employs ‘very low energy musical whimsy’ to express his latest concerns - and he utilises a little of his own technology when he cranks out homespun songs on his tiny keyboard.

“I don't think about the way I am onstage very much. I'd like to think I'm just being myself with a PA and more spotlights, but I'm not the best judge of this. I've always liked writing songs. My father is a jazz musician so we grew up listening to perfect rhyming scans and melodies of Tin Pan Alley songs. You know, show tunes. 'When love congeals, it soon reveals, the faint aroma of performing seals’. Amazing stuff. But I certainly can’t write like that, so I suppose my stuff is a reaction to that. Super loose and barely songs.”

O’Doherty started out in 1998 at the legendary Comedy Cellar club in Dublin. It’s a venue that’s played a crucial part at the beginning of the careers of many a talented Irish comedian in recent years.

Taking risks

“The great thing, from an artistic point of view, about a gig like the Comedy Cellar is [it’s] a door-split. One of the comics does the door and it gets split five ways. The great thing about that is that the comics aren't trying to impress a booker, who is in turn just looking at whether the punters are getting it.

"Comics are trying to entertain themselves and the other comics present. That’s an environment that is very conducive to people taking risks and really taking the time to develop their own thing. That's why there have been so many really original Irish standups in recent years. Ardal (O’Hanlon), Dylan Moran, Tommy Tiernan, Maeve Higgins.”

O’Doherty’s own unique style was finally acknowledged in Edinburgh last year with his If.comedy award win, after being nominated for the main award in 2006 and the newcomer in 2000.

Modest

“It was very nice to win the award. It was something I didn't think about very much while I was there, mainly because I was doing three shows every day.”

But he’s characteristically modest about the accolade. “Looking at the shortlist of people who have won it before, it's great to be on there with them. (Steve) Coogan, Demetri Martin, Will Adamsdale, these are great comedians. I just have to make sure I'm not the person who ruins it. Who turns out to be the one Hitler on this particular Time Man Of The Year Award list.”

David O’Doherty and his David O’Doh-Party is at Green Room on October 22.