Comedy for celibate celiacs with one channel! That was the mission statement of diminutive Cork comedian, Michael Mee, when he decided to put himself about as a stand-up comic. You ve got to admit it s a pretty original angle. In fact, you ll be hard put to find it in any trigonometry textbook. But it doesn t really sound like a great night out, does it?: no sex, no yeast, no rock n roll.
Yet anyone who s come across the 31-year-old Munster man on their comedy travels he s often to be found in the International Bar on Thursday nights and intermittently at the Laughter Lounge will know just how talented Mee is as a writer of Woody Allen-esque, self-deprecating one-liners. And his delivery is as slick as an Exxon oil spillage. But isn t such a manifesto limiting his potential audience just a tad?
Well, it just leaves me! he deadpans. But I wanted to do stuff where you could see the joke. I don t like observational humour. I like one-liners. I wanted it to be the kind of stuff that you didn t have to be drunk to be into. I hate all that comedy that harps on about drinking and spewing on the stairs.
It s not so much the comedy routines about spewing on the stairs that I mind as much as the actual spewing itself. But I take his point: there is a tendency among some comics to simply trot out lowest common denominator gags about Being Drunk and Being Hungover while satirising whatever crud they saw on the telly the night before. Mee, though, prefers to dig a little deeper for his inspiration. He is the thinking man s, rather than the drinking man s, comedian.
My own personal hero is Woody Allen, says Mee. His stand-up and his prose were a really big inspiration to me. To some extent, that s what I wanted to do too: use the stand-up as a way of getting into movies or writing.
Indeed, Mee initially saw himself as a writer, working on novels and short stories in his spare time his day then being given over to a lucrative job lecturing in Law in the University Of Limerick, a job which he held for four years before taking a year out.
I saw an ad for a competition in Hot Press, in conjunction with Kenny Live and Tetley Tea, and decided to try my hand at it. A lot of my early material came straight from the comic novels I had written. I made a video of myself doing my routine, sent it into RTE and got picked.
Then I entered, at the behest of Irish Times comedy correspondent, Brian Boyd, the So You Think You re Funny competition in the Comedy Cellar in the International Bar, which is the gateway to Edinburgh for new comedians. It was MCed by Tommy Tiernan, who liked my act and asked me to do some lunchtime gigs in The King s Head in Galway.
It was an incredible break. It meant that I could try out some of my stuff I had notebooks full of material for a full 20 minutes each time, whereas most of the time if you do an open spot, it s just for 5 minutes. I always feel grateful to Tommy for that. Then I got through to the last 50 in Edinburgh and I met people like Dylan Moran, which was interesting. Then when I got back, I started getting gigs, and got to 20-minute sets really fast.
But everybody I met said to me, incredulously, you gave up your job to do stand-up comedy!!! . But I didn t. I had taken a year off to write but it just turned out that way.
Mee is still writing fiction as well as comedy. He has had short stories published both here and in the States and is currently enrolled on a screenwriting adaptation course, in which authors of plays or novels are taught how to transform their work for use in the cinema. He decided to apply for the course after being told numerous times that a novel he had written, Angel Of Death, read more like a film script than a book.
The course is run by a theatre company called Vesuvius, he explains. They re going to hire Vicar St. when the classes end in September and get professional actors and directors in to perform half an hour of each script. There ll be people from the film industry present, so the idea is to hook up with an agent or whatever.
This brings us back to the debate about whether stand-up is now just a means to an end the end being film and television contracts. Mee doesn t see why they should be mutually exclusive. And he sees strong historical evidence to suggest that the cult of the comic auteur is a very recent phenomenon.
Effectively stand-up is very new, he says. It started in the States. If you look at the guys who popularised stand-up Jack Benny, Milton Burle, Bob Hope none of them wrote their own stuff. Bob Hope didn t write a scrap yet he would be one of the best stand-ups ever. To some extent, they didn t see stand-up as expressing their innermost angst. It was more of a performance thing; and they were amazing performers.
Jack Benny got the longest laugh in radio history out of a silence. He came on, looked at the studio audience, and everybody just howled. I ve read interviews with these guys and that s what they talk about: your body, your expression, your intonation.
Now, it s come about that everybody writes their own stuff. I think that Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks are a misleading precedent. They re the reason why people say that stand-up should change the world and come straight from your gut. I ve never heard Hicks. I m always meaning to. But I don t see him as being someone I d be interested in, to be honest, because I don t see stand-up as being something you use to make points. Bill Hicks couldn t make a living. He lost his sanity and probably became ill because of how frustrated he was. He was completely dissatisfied with what he was doing.
Michael Mee can currently be heard in the guise of a frankly hilarious comic creation known as Barry Walsh the running joke being that, coming from Cork, he insists that everyone pronounce it Welsh . It s a provincial thing. The Welsh character appears in a series of sketches Mee wrote for the weekly radio magazine, Morning Glory, which runs on RTE Radio 1 on Saturdays (10-11am). Mee explains the character s genesis.
Although I was born in Canada and lived there till I was 5, I grew up in Cork, he states.
Everybody in Cork loves Cork. It s not something that they ll deny. They ll say: and with good reason! . Barry Welsh was originally an idea for a stand-up routine. It started with the idea that Cork people are very hard to impress.
It s an Irish thing but also a particularly Cork thing. You know this idea that Irish people are great travellers. They re not! Every Irish person that I know in New Orleans or Florida is saving up to go home. They re all weeping into their beer in Irish bars.
I have this friend who was going out with a French girl and he was back from his holidays. He met this guy he was in school with in Cork. He told him he was just back from France, after driving from Paris down to the south of France, spending three weeks travelling around. His schoolmate said, in all sincerity (affects thick Cork brogue): what was that like? Much the same as here, was it? .
There is this attitude in Cork that there s no point in going anywhere if you live there. I had a similar experience myself. I met this guy in Mallow after coming back from an inter-railing trip around the Alps of Europe Switzerland, Germany, France. My friend said (thick Cork accent again): oh yeah, inter-railing. What was that like? A bit of a drag, was it? . He was dead serious.
And I got in this taxi one time in Cork. The driver said (er, same again): so where are you coming from? . I said I was living in Limerick. He said: isn t it a fright to God when a young fella has to leave his own native city . I mean, it s only a few miles up the road! And he wasn t saying it because of its Stab City reputation. These are just examples of the way Cork people think. n
Morning Glory is broadcast on Saturdays (10-11am) on RTE Radio 1. Watch out for Michael Mee on the BBC NI live stand-up show, The Empire Laughs Back, to be broadcast in October.