Mild At Heart

In these economically straitened times, punters expect value for money when they shell out for gig tickets - and the Galway Comedy Festival-bound David O’Doherty has hit on a unique way of ensuring his audiences derive maximum satisfaction from his performances.

“In the context of recessions and stuff, I like the idea that my comedy has become 15% more practical,” explains O’Doherty. “I only really have one light skill for practical use, and that is I worked for five years in a variety of Dublin bike shops. There was a song that has no lyrics as such - the only words were ‘Showing you that I care through the medium of bike repair’. And whatever was wrong with the audience’s bikes they could just shout them out, and I would do my best to fix them.”
As well as dreaming up such innovative additions to his live shows, David has been busy on a number of other fronts. His well-received book from last year, the faux-educational book 100 Facts About Pandas (which received endorsements from the likes of The Mighty Boosh, Flight Of The Conchords and Jimmy Carr), has just been published in the US, and the comic has nearly completed work on the follow-up, 100 Facts About Sharks.
“I’ve just done the 97th fact,” says O’Doherty. “With regards to the Panda book, we got a deal with Penguin and it’s just come out in America. They’ve been very honest about it - the editor said, ‘Listen, there’s 10 of us on the panel who decide these things. Six of us thought it was one of the funniest things we’d ever seen. And four people said, ‘This is dreadful.’ That is a strong metaphor for my comedy, it seems to be the general rule of thumb. Actually, a funny thing has just happened in the last week.
We don’t like the American cover, and Penguin have just released a compilation of their favourite covers from the past 75 years. They put our cover, which we don’t like, in it and had us write 200 words on it. Our synopsis of our feelings towards the cover finishes with the words, ‘Crappy publishing jerks.’ So I don’t know how bountiful my US career will be after that!”
O’Doherty has been dipping his toes in the US live scene, and has some interesting points to make about the country’s comedy circuit.
“Stand-up is still really seen in the States as a gateway to doing other things,” he observes. “So it’s virtually impossible to make a living from doing it. If you don’t aspire to being in movies and sitcoms, or doing more lucrative TV work, you don’t really have many prospects as a gigging stand-up, the way you do here - that’s one of the great perks of being in Ireland. It’s weird, you don’t get paid for most gigs you do in New York; they’re all completely for free.
“A lot of the great American stand-ups of the recent boom, people like Eugene Merman and Kristen Schall, regularly do gigs for nothing. It’s purely for the love of stand-up, and they make money from doing either bits on other people’s shows or touring with bands, or in Kristen’s case, she acts in movies. It’s fairly bizarre, just when you finish a gig, and you go, ‘That went quite well’, and you’re sort of thinking that someone might hand you an envelope. But all you get is a handshake and the person saying, ‘Well, there you go - goodnight.’”
While in the US, O’Doherty played in the Bumper Shoots Festival in Seattle, where among the headliners was one Bob Dylan.
“I was hanging out with Bob!” he laughs. “Well, I wasn’t, but I spoke to the man who runs the festival, and I’m a bit of a Bob obsessive, so I said, ‘You must have something about Bob you can tell me.’ He said, yes, it’s in the rider that he has to be able to drive his tour bus up to the bottom of the steps that take the artists to the stage. So, 10 minutes from when he’s meant to be on, the bus turns up, and the doors remain shut until someone knocks on the door and says, ’Alright, you’re on now Bob’. Then the doors open, and he mumbles his way up the steps onto the stage and does the set.
“I’d been prepared for the worst really, but I have to say I did quite enjoy his performance. He’s managed to find a way of making even his most tender songs all sound like blues romps, with a man who looks like, I don’t know, an ancient Egyptian lady in a cowboy hat singing along. Anyway, the dude said that when he finished the set, he walked down the steps and had one foot on his bus. He tilts his head back and goes, ‘No, they don’t want more’, and the doors of the bus shut. And as people are still cheering for an encore, the bus is off driving up some highway.”
It’s a very satisfying Bob Dylan story - just the idea that he’s almost like this messianic figure who can do as he pleases!
“Yeah, that’s very true actually,” chuckles David. “It was super fun.”
Back on this side of the Atlantic, the comic has been doing some TV work. He will shortly host an episode of Nevermind The Buzzcocks, and he has also been developing an idea for a historical sitcom in the Blackadder mould.
“I started watching Blackadder, and I just like the tone of that,” David elaborates. “I like a classic three-room sitcom with a studio audience. It’s still very early days of development on it, but I really think we have an idea. It remains to be seen if anyone agrees with us on that, but all I’ll say is that it involves Antarctic exploration. To be honest, I’ve always been obsessed with Shackleton and Scott. The bizarreness of it, of the idea of wanting to be the first to the South Pole. There’s something very childish but also very exciting about that.
“There’s a legendary tale of how they put an ad in the Times which said, ‘Men wanted for a hazardous trip to the South Pole. Low chance of success. Starvation and death a possibility.’ And they got 14,000 responses, because it was kind of like the Big Brother or X Factor of the day. But it seems like a more interesting thing to do than wanting to be a pop star.”
Moving on to another topic, I caught one of Flight Of The Conchords’ sell-out shows in the Olympia earlier this year. A long-term friend of the New Zealand duo thanks to their shared apprenticeship on the comedy circuit, O’Doherty supported the pair at the Dublin dates.
“We went to Cornucopia beforehand,” he recalls. “Then going in the stage door of the Olympia, there were people lunging towards Bret and Jemaine. It’s strange when that happens - these are the people who painted my last flat! (Laughs) In exchange for staying there, they were put to work. It’s funny that strangers are suddenly trying to touch their coats. But they’re such genuinely nice fellas, and they’ve been remarkably unaffected by all of this, because they realise how ridiculous it is. And that’s given them a freedom in terms of writing and performing.
“They’re kind of aware that the whole thing could easily just disappear tomorrow, or at least if it did, it wouldn’t massively affect their lives, cos they’re laidback guys who enjoy comedy and other things. There’s always been an element of, ‘We’ll just have a bit of fun really.’ As opposed to seeing comedians at the Apollo, and you can see that fear in their eyes of, ’Oh my God, this is my big break!’ You always get the impression with Flight of the Conchords that if it all goes tits-up, it’s, ‘Ah well, I like playing squash and bass in a band. It’ll be fine.’”
Finally, David states that he is very excited about the prospect of returning to Galway for the Comedy Festival.
“My first ever headliner was in Galway,” he notes. “I continued to go there and people continued to come. It’s been the ideal model - I like the idea of going back to a place and building a crowd, and Galway is the one place where that has really worked. I’ve always had a good time there, so I'm looking forward to it.”

David O'Doherty performs in the Radisson Live Lounge (October 21) and the Town Hall Theatre (22) as part of the Bulmers Galway Comedy Festival.