Gone But Not Forgotten

"Comedians are like the priests of a new religion, looking for God when they know God doesn't exist. . . It sounds very profound, but it probably doesn't mean anything."
Still, it makes for a catchy opening paragraph. Our comedic cleric is the very reverend Ian MacPherson, who recently broke his vow of silence by taking to the stage at the Comedy Cellar in the International Bar and the CRC Benefit at the Olympia for the first time in years. The 47-year-old Dubliner had excommunicated himself from the stand-up fraternity to concentrate on writing his comic novel, Deep Probings - The Autobiography Of A Genius, which was eventually published last September.
MacPherson has a sardonic, slightly surreal take on things, and his conversation is peppered with quotable observations on the nature of comedy, amongst other things, that reveal a keen eye for the absurd. Unlike the laddish London scene exemplified by the success of Skinner ... Baddiel and their ilk, MacPherson's is an altogether subtler type of humour; more cerebral than spermicidal. And he reckons his novel is the closest we will get to reading his mind.
"Comedy to me is a parallel universe," says MacPherson. "The book I've written, I pretend it's not me but it is a version of me - it's my comic persona on paper. I wasn't able to do it on stage . . . because I wasn't getting the work. So I tried to write sitcoms, which if they work are brilliant: I think Larry Sanders is one of the great pieces of work on television.
"But just like the stage is, to pick the best example, Jason Byrne's playground, for me it's a book, because I can do anything I like with it. The main character, who is called Fiachra MacFiach, rails against a character called Seamus Heaney, who in my book, is a fishmonger. It's 'S. Heaney - Fishmonger; wet fish a speciality'. And he wants to talk to Heaney about art; but Heaney just wants to talk about fish. It sounds like surrealism. The main character is like the guy who sits at the back of a poetry reading, thinking, 'I am better than that person up there'. . . but he isn't."
The choice of a literary icon as an anchor in MacPherson's book is telling: he goes on to explain how his comedy is inspired less by other comedians than writers - I'd say there are a few well-thumbed editions of Beckett and Flann O'Brien nestling on the MacPherson bookcase. Which is not to say that MacPherson has remained unmoved by other stand-ups. He mentions Jerry Sadowitz, Arnold Brown and John Hegley among the peers he most admires, while he also has words of praise for some of the current generation of Irish comics.
"Mark Doherty, to me, is the best Irish comedian I've seen for years," is MacPherson's unanimous verdict. "It's very subtle but he has great body language as well. He has the same spirit as Johnny Immaterial, who I used to work with - he was one of the greats. He gave it up, though - nobody understood a word he was saying!
"Jason Byrne is totally different - it's like rock'n'roll comedy - but I like him too. He's like the kid in school who has the use of the playground for about 5 seconds before anybody else gets on it; before the teacher comes back and says, 'stop that, you naughty boy!'."
If Ian MacPherson were marooned on a desert island, though, the comedy video he would take with him would feature the world's most lovably inept magician. "Three minutes of Tommy Cooper on stage is worth every great work of art I have seen this century," he gushes. "I'm not saying he's my hero because I don't have any heroes . . . but if I did, Cooper might be one of them."
MacPherson may not be a household name outside of his own house - which, incidentally, is in a council estate in Sheffield (don't ask) - but he commands the respect of his peers, many of whom did go on to win fame and fortune in Telly land. In fact, he remains free of bitterness towards those he saw hurtling past him up the ladder. His tendency towards self-deprecation is best exemplified when after stumbling onto it mid-conversation, he requests that I use the headline, printed above, for this piece.
Because he began his career at a time (1983, to be exact) when there was no comedy scene in Dublin to speak of - back then Murphy's Ungagged Festivals was more likely to be a kidnappers' convention - MacPherson was forced to ply his trade in London, where the main Irish comedians then doing the rounds were Owen O'Neill and Michael Redmond. He also remembers compering a gig which featured an open spot by a fresh-faced novice by the name of Eddie Izzard. And then there was the time he was asked to zip up Julian Clary's dress (maybe this is why Clary now advertises Daz).
He did however come close to having his own sitcoms produced for British television but for a variety of reasons, they never made it. One was called Lights Out, and was set in a lighthouse, while the other was called Woodcock, and was inspired by MacPherson's miserable experiences at the hands of the Christian Brothers (the very same school, he says with relish, that gave us Charlie Haughey, The Bachelors and Brendan Gleeson).
"Woodcock is set on a ship in the 18th century," he explains. "It's about a kid who gets on this ship where everyone has been press-ganged onto it, and they all wanted to kill him. If you were alive in those days and you had a reasonably pleasant childhood up to then, and you were sent to a Christian Brothers school, you knew everything about the world that you needed to know in about 45 minutes."
Such as?
"At a certain point in your life, you realise that your parents are not God; that you're on your own. You also realise that there are men who want to fuck you. And you didn't even know that this existed before. You find out all the bad things in the world, the nasty side; the fact that you're actually all alone in this world. And then the rest of your life is probably spent realising that everybody is in the same boat as you - which is probably why I set this thing on a boat. What I do is I make fun of the fact that we're all alone. To me, comedy is putting somebody in the worst possible position and seeing how they deal with it.
"That said, the Christian Brothers, as I realise now, were also victims of what was going on in Irish society. And I'd like to put on record that there were some wonderful Christian Brothers, most of whom left the order . . . and some of whom continued. My brother got approached to join the order - I didn't, which I take as a compliment - and there was a lot of pressure in those days to do that. But the whole history of Ireland is based on the idea of the victim becoming the oppressor. The great thing about Ireland is that there's never a lack of something to hate: if it's not religion, it's money."
Woodcock may never have made it onto our screens but, nevertheless, MacPherson recalls one instance which, he believes, made his whole career in comedy worthwhile.
"I did a reading recently in the north of Scotland," he says. "There was this woman there who was looking at me strangely. Eventually she locked into what I was doing and started laughing - it's funny, when you laugh, ten years falls off your life. Afterwards she bought a book for her husband and her son.
"I got talking to her. I didn't understand her accent. I asked her where she was from. She said she was from the Free State of Danzig, which is Gdansk now. She said the reason she lives in the north of Scotland is Hitler - they were refugees. I thought for a woman like that, who has gone through the shit she has gone through, to appreciate what I do is probably the best compliment I have had in my life."
For his own part, one of the methods MacPherson himself uses to keep the demons at bay is to take to the water. When he's in Dublin, he likes to wade, Reginald Perrin-like, into the deep green sea.
"I go swimming in Dollymount Strand," he states. "A lot of people used to go there to swim. I knew a fella who said that it saved his life - he said that he was going to commit suicide. But he started swimming. When you're in the sea, you realise what you are. Everything washes off you. It's probably like Mass; like religion for a person who doesn't have it."
Bless him, Father. n
* Deep Probings - The Autobiography Of A Genius is published by Thirsty Books.