Bowel Play

I WENT to the opening night of comedian Brendan O’Carroll’s new show at the Tivoli shortly after a visit to the dentist which had left my gums stitched from one end to the other. Smiling was difficult, laughter painful. By evening’s end most of the stitches were burst and an expensive return to the dentist was necessary.

This was not funny, but I forgive Mr. O’Carroll. What I cannot forgive is the amateurism of those who produce him. The invitation did not give the time when his show started and the glossy programme (in association with the Evening Herald) does not say when it is due to end its run. I can only say that if there is time, go and see it.

It is rough around the edges, particularly during the first half when the dynamo from Finglas is presumably testing the audience to see how far he can go, and especially because of the backing band, led by his partner, manager and best friend Gerry Browne, who was with the comedian in the bad times, circa 1990.

They have been on the dole together. That is a bonding experience. It does not entitle Mr. Browne to say “fuck”. Most people cannot handle that word and he, most certainly, can’t. The band doesn’t even play tunes we can identify with. On the other hand, Brendan and Gerry are on a roll, so what do I know? It has to be said, touchingly, that Brendan kept looking back over his shoulder to see what Gerry was doing and how he was reacting. There’s men for you.

It’s a pity that Brendan O’Carroll worries about that. When he stands alone, in the spotlight, talking about what it is to be male, he makes an intimate, raw, humorous connection with the human species that should be a compulsory element of sex education in Irish schools. Perhaps every school in the world. Why didn’t they tell us about wanking the way he does?

On-stage, he talked us through it, using every cheesy term that isn’t in the book, and deploying every gesture. It was everything a female wanted to know, and didn’t really, about men, and everything they’ve ever told us. His description, and depiction, of the pubescent male’s awakening was joyful and sexy, using the microphone as alter-penis. When he posed before an imaginary mirror, experimenting with his bud, confidently turning it with practise into a Sam Snort instrument of challenge to women (albeit a fantastic audo-didactic one), fear seeped away. Brendan O’Carroll should be every young girl’s father.

RUNNING GAGS

Then he turn to how that penis should be handled, in which matter every man is an expert and the rest of us are not. He demonstrated every mistake in the imaginary female book of these things. The hand-held microphone howled. Later in the show he imagined cunnilingus – about which it has to be said that the man is trying but he hasn’t really put his mouth where his money is. Give him time and experience and commitment, and tiocfaidh ár lá.

Where he was at his best was in an experience common to us all – bowel movements abroad, particularly in Costa Del Spanish Tummy, colloquially known at Shite. Brendan O’Carroll talks the way everyone thinks and most don’t say.

Starting at home, where one wipes and looks at the results in the paper in the hand – “Why? Take my word for it, it’s just shite” (that you can break off with a stick) – he moves onto the phenomenon of liquid acid through the hole, while the beloved is knocking at the bathroom door and demanding equal access down the tubes or else “I’ll shite all over the children.” To which he says “Come in, the sink’s on the left, throw the children into the bath.” Or something like that – all the while simulating a person who dare not rise from the toilet bowl to unlock the door lest a trail of the brown stuff be left behind on the tiles.

This monologue is punctuated by a series of running gags on farts – from “the short crispy ones”, eminently and existentially satisfying, to the ominous whistling emanations, followed by gurgles, which prefigure disaster in the nether world. Listening to Brendan O’Carroll is a relief. He too has been that soldier. He, alone, is the person who brings into the public arena a love that dare not speak its name. “Between shit and piss we are born, between shit and piss we are conceived” as the Catholic Church puts it in more sombre spake – in Latin, so’s we can’t understand.

Between one and the other lies the essential difference between women and men. To a man, a toilet is a place where a fellow goes to do the necessary. To a woman, it’s a “community centre.”

Brendan O’Carroll doesn’t quite know why, and can’t say, and it doesn’t matter. It’s the way he tells it, sending you away to ponder the answer to that still small question of humanity, that makes you quote him in wonder – the man from Finglas is a comic, truly intellectual, genius. He gives a person pause to think, amid space for laughter.