Dara O'Briain

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The audience is the funniest gag at any of my gigs
By DAVID LOWE
2008-12-02
The Sun

THEY say laughter is the best medicine — and Dara O’Briain could not agree more. So with the economy in the doldrums, the Mock The Week host reckons a hearty chortle could do us all good.

Dara says: “Hardship and humour go hand in hand. It’s a natural reaction to life. For example, people who work in the grimmest jobs have the funniest sense of humour. Firemen and surgeons love a good old laugh at the awful stuff they face day to day. And if you think about it, a child’s first giggle happens before it walks, runs or talks. That’s how innate laughing is to human beings. So, in any situation you have the capacity to laugh. Even in the most difficult times.”

Dara, who moved to London from Dublin six years ago, also remains healthily sceptical of the recent wave of pessimism which has engulfed the nation. The 36-year-old comic says: “You’d think we are in the middle of a natural disaster from the way people are getting on. I remember the last recession in 1987. It wasn’t the end of the world. I don’t recall my family having to live in a dust bowl and being forced to make a living selling pencils.

“It wasn’t the Great Depression. OK, so Rick Astley was top of the charts, but the Brits got through that. Actually, when it comes to the credit crunch I think the British have worse Catholic guilt than the Irish. When I speak to people, they seem to harbour a secret desire to see the return of rationing. There’s nothing the English like more than the threat of hardship and wallowing in the situation. Folk are thinking, ‘This is what we deserve. We’ve too much money.’ Thankfully as much as the Brits love to be miserable, they love to laugh at the fact they’re so miserable too.”

After his sell-out UK and Ireland tour earlier this year, Dara admits that simply chatting to UK audiences often results in comedy gold. He says: “Britain has the best comedy circuit in the world. I love touring the country because the local people are the funniest thing about my shows. Earlier this year, in Derby, there was a bloke in the front row who worked for Nottinghamshire police. Next to him was a lorry driver who played Robin Hood in a tourist attraction. A guy on the same row was pointed out, and when I asked his name, he said, ‘Arthur Merryman’. The audience went wild when I welcomed Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Merry Men.”

Nearby Bridlington also produced one of the tour’s most rib-tickling moments. Dara says: “There was a guy who confirmed his employer, Rolls-Royce, has a cannon which fires chickens into jet engines to make sure they can resist birds during takeoff. Someone actually goes to Sainsbury’s, buys the chickens and shoots them into the machine. It was even funnier when he revealed a rival firm had started doing the same. They bought the equipment, sent someone to the supermarket for the chicken and fired it into an engine. Unfortunately, the chicken totally wrecked it. A clever engineer pointed out the birds should probably be defrosted before being fired. They’d hit the engine with a solid chicken cannon ball — with devastating results.”

Although he describes himself as a stand-up comic, Dara is also the hugely popular presenter of topical BBC2 comedy show Mock The Week. After the controversy surrounding Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s abusive calls to veteran actor Andrew Sachs, a risque joke from one of the show’s panellists also hit the headlines. Dara says: “Frankie Boyle made a joke about the Queen and it didn’t go down well in all quarters. I say not every TV show is for everyone. I didn’t think what Russell and Jonathan did was a particularly good routine or a classic comedy moment. But sense of humour is like music, and it’s a beautiful wide world out there — hopefully with room for everyone.”

Dara adds: “I think the BBC is in danger of losing its top talent every time a certain section of the media gets angry. If you think about it, there were three resignations and one suspension as a result. Thankfully my gigs have never got me in much trouble personally. I have a far too likeable persona, of course! I think I’m too silly to be taken seriously. For years I’ve been giving out about homeopathy and psychics and the annoying Gillian McKeith. Nothing has ever come of it. I like to think that’s because I was right all along.”

As a student, Dara studied maths and theoretical physics at Dublin City University. But he devoted himself to comedy after realising it gave him more street cred with the ladies — and even did a spot of kids’ TV as his career took off.

“I got sick of girls coming up and explaining why they hated maths,” Dara recalls. “I realised funny equals f*nny! Before comedy became my main job I did kids’ TV presenting because I had to pay the bills. I wasn’t exactly Timmy Mallett. The show was called Echo Island and aired on the Irish channel RTE. My hair was already going, so by the second or third series I was a bald man on a kids’ show. I looked like a weird uncle walking around the set. Actually there was a cockatoo who used to join me. He was called Rocco and although we all loved him at first, by series three or four his squawking became extremely annoying and all the cast lost interest. We’d be shooting scenes and he’d wander disconsolately past. I think because we were already working with children, the bird became a step too far.

“My kids’ TV career ended in 1998. I stopped because I was getting more and more comedy gigs. People would see me on Echo Island at 5pm, then I’d be doing a stand-up gig that night in front of adults. I could see them thinking, ‘Hang on a minute, that kids’ TV presenter just said c***’.”

Dara has some important tips for would-be comedians trying to make it on the circuit. He suggests: “You can’t be conventionally good-looking. In fact, it helps if you look a bit shambolic. I don’t think Peter Kay or myself would be successful if we were handsome. The worst career move I could make right now would be to get a wig. Also, during your routine, don’t stop to inhale. That’s a great trick. Keep talking and no one can interrupt or heckle.”

Although reluctant to talk about his private life, Dara reveals he has a wife and daughter. And he’ll be spending Christmas at home in London with his family and other close relatives. “I love Christmas,” he says. “It’s a chance to switch off and forget about stand-up and comedy. The closest I come is reading out the jokes in the crackers. Actually it’s the one time I never get a laugh. That’s because the jokes are so bad they could only ever induce a groan. At least, that’s my excuse anyway.”

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That story about the frozen chicken has been doing the rounds for years.

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Interview: Dara O'Briain
Dara O’Briain tells Andrew Pettie that Mock the Week doesn’t discriminate against women.
By Andrew Pettie
02 Jul 2009

Stand-up comedians are usually heckled by members of the audience. Dara O’Briain, however, has recently been getting flak from an unexpected quarter: his fellow comedians. The charge levelled at O’Briain in his role as ringmaster of the topical satirical panel show Mock the Week, which returns to BBC Two next Thursday, is that panel shows are sexist.

In an interview with Radio Times, Victoria Wood argued that panel shows champion a distinctly male style of comedy and testosterone-fuelled one-upmanship. “Women’s jokes aren’t about trying to top the last person or ‘win’ the game,” she said. “I think that if more women were in charge [of panel shows], everyone would get a look-in.” Women are underrepresented, said Wood, both in terms of their appearances and in being allowed to get a word in edgeways. O’Briain, though, says this has nothing to do with sexism.

“There is a very small representation of women stand-ups on Mock the Week,” says the 37-year-old Irish comic. “But that’s because women just don’t do stand-up. A few do it, and a few ----ing good ones do it. But there’s a 90 per cent, 10 per cent split the entire way down the industry, from the Edinburgh Festival to the open mic level. Every [panel] show I’ve done we’ve torn our hair out trying to find female comics and there is no industry more hungry for women to be involved. But there just aren’t that many female stand-ups.”

That 90/10 split invites the inflammatory question of whether women are temperamentally unsuited to stand-up. “Most of the great female comics – and there are some exceptions, like Jo Brand – work in character,” says O’Briain. “A lot of stand-up comedy is about owning the room – it can be a bit of a dogfight. So you could argue that that makes it a testosterone thing.”

It is interesting that O’Briain cites Brand as an example of a female stand-up who shines in a male-dominated industry – because even Brand now refuses to appear on his show. “I don’t do Mock the Week any more,” she said recently. “[I] didn’t like the prospect of having to bite someone’s foot off before they let us say something.”

According to O’Briain, Brand is right: appearing on Mock the Week can feel like a bloodsport. But, he says, the fearsome sense of competition is a result of how the series – which asks comics to improvise skits and jokes inspired by the week’s headlines – is filmed. “Some guests worry that they’re not getting enough jokes on,” he says. “Well, everyone complains about that, including me. Each show takes two and a half hours to record and there are six comedians all trying to get their jokes in. That works out as four minutes per comedian. I don’t know if I’d even get on to Mock the Week if I wasn’t the host.” There is certainly no shortage of comedians eager to take part. Alongside regulars Frankie Boyle and Hugh Dennis the seventh series will see appearances from Adam Hills, Ed Byrne, David Mitchell and two female stand-ups, Gina Yashere and Lucy Porter.

Despite being born in County Wicklow, educated at University College, Dublin (where he studied maths and theoretical physics) and starting his career on the Irish TV channel RTE (as a children’s TV presenter), O’Briain is now an established feature on the British comedy map. He’s using his outsider’s view of Britain as the starting point for a book, Tickling the English, which will be out in October. “It’s part tour diary, part travelogue and part Irish man poking around in your psyche – like a kind of nosey neighbour,” he says.

One thing O’Briain says he particularly likes about London, where he lives with his wife Susan, a doctor, is the relative anonymity it allows him. In contrast to Dublin, where he is constantly recognised and accosted by fans, O’Briain says London feels “quieter and more manageable”. To keep his personal life out of the spotlight, he has a golden rule: never appear on a TV show “with the word ‘celebrity’ in the title.” “That is Pandora’s box, a Faustian pact right there,” he says. “The closest I’ve come was when I was checking my emails during a break in a gig. I walked back out on stage and told the crowd, “I’ve just been asked to do Strictly Come Dancing! It got the biggest cheer of the night. But I still said no.”

- Mock the Week is on BBC Two next Thursday at 9.00pm

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Emmanuel Adebayor's kick in the face for a beautiful relationship
Emmanuel Adebayor's divorce from Arsenal is the most crazy and acrimonious split yet
Dara O'Briain
19th Sept 2009

In all my chequered romantic past, I don't think I've ever had a break-up as acrimonious as the one I've recently had with Emmanuel Adebayor. I mean I usually try to keep on some sort of speaking terms with exes – at least for the sake of mutual friends and colleagues. But this one? Wow, none of the craziest of crazy bitches in my past has ever stamped on a friend's face in order to get their point across.

I mean, there was K who took all my belongings and threw them out of the window, even though I was screaming: "Why are you throwing them out the window? This is my flat!" There was MJ, who in an effort to show me exactly who the winner was when I dumped her, hit on a guy in the student bar in front of me and then threw up on him. And there was P, who in the middle of a particularly vicious set-to picked it up a notch by reaching for the nearest lamp and throwing it at my head. Luckily for me it was still plugged in, so it twanged to a halt six inches from my face.

Ah, happy memories.

By the way, if you're trying to decipher who P, K and MJ are to see if you've missed some extra layer of comedy, please don't waste any more of your valuable time. In order to retain some privacy I have both changed the names and completely invented most of the actions of the women mentioned. The point is, I've never had a relationship go so bad, so fast, as it has with Emmanuel Adebayor. When P left did she run 100 yards to show me her new boyfriend? Did she slide across the turf in front of me with her legs apart in celebration? No, she did not. And the sad fact is, I treated her a lot worse than I treated Emmanuel Adebayor. At least with P I was the one always looking around for a better deal. But listen to me with the quick word again. The question I should ask is: how did it get so hate-filled so quickly?

It was only six months ago that I was sitting up on my holidays watching the African Footballer of the Year ceremony, live from Lagos, to see if our boy would win. There was no real tension; he was the only nominee in the room, was dressed in full Togolese national garb and had his mother in attendance. Hear that Manu? I watched you collect an award with your mother. Think of that next time you stamp on Cesc.

I make the point that this was only six months ago to dispel this idea, beloved of Mark Hughes, that Adebayor was the victim of a vicious year and a half of booing. This is nonsense. He got booed at the start of last season, mainly at the pre-season Emirates Cup. His big problem was that he never won back the cheering of the year before. The Emirates used to reverberate to the Adebayor songs. We heard them often and we sang them loud. And then … but this is old ground, let's not rake it all up again.

No, we loved that crazy guy with his big grin and lolloping style. And now we loathe each other. He bitches about Arsenal followers in the papers; the travelling fans scream abuse at him. It's all quite sad. We hate each other so much that when he did his stupid goal celebration thing Arsenal fans were so incensed Craig Bellamy was photographed trying to calm things down. When Craig Bellamy is the voice of reason, well, that's a sign of the apocalypse.

So enough with the hate, Emmanuel Adebayor. I honestly felt queasy and cuckolded all weekend after your performance on Saturday. I was surprised by just how unpleasant I found the whole thing. So, I'm moving on. It's time for someone to be the bigger man. It's time for someone to draw a line under this sorry saga before it turns into Brad and Angelina, or worse, Jordan and Peter Andre.

It might be too late for us to be friends now, but at the very least I can wish you well. Good luck with the rest of the season Emmanuel, with Man City and with Togo. But mainly, best of luck recovering from whatever mystery muscle strain, toe sprain, or split ends, keeps you out of the return match.

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Don't Mock the Weak
Dara O Briain Avoids the Personal Humiliation Brand of Comedy.
By Hannah Stephenson
belfasttelegraph.co.uk

When appearing on television, BBC Two's Dara O Briain looks to his Mock The Week co-stars for laughs. But the Irish comedian says that when he's on the road doing stand-up, his audience provides the fodder for most of the gags. Indeed, those have crossed his comic path while on the road have provided O Briain with such a wealth of comedy gold that he's written a book, Tickling The English.

After every gig O'Briain explains that he wrote pages of notes for future reference and the resulting book charts some of his hilarious experiences with audiences and hecklers. His stage show, for anyone who hasn't seen it, requires some audience participation. But it's not the type of show where you sink down in your seat in the hope you won't be spotted, as O'Briain avoids the personal humiliation route taken by so many of his peers.

"Hopefully, I have a warm, welcoming face," he smiles, looking more like a Mafia hitman than a gentle giant. "I don't do the, 'Look at you' and slag you off' stuff. I want to take whatever facts they give me and use it as a starting-point. If a member of the audience gets a laugh, a smart comedian will step back and laugh along as well. And you also want to create moments that the audience knows won't happen on any other night."

There have been times when individuals have left him tongue-tied, he admits. "It's rarely bad tongue-tied. Bad tongued-tied is, 'I'm an engineer and I work with powerhouse solutions for high energy compression.'" On his travels, the 37-year-old found that there are no national characteristics shared by us all. "There is no Everyman. You will not meet an English person who sums up the entire nation," he shrugs.

But there is a definite north-south divide when it comes to audiences, he says. "It's much easier to talk to people in the north than people in the south," he insists. "Audiences from the north are much more willing to speak and join in. Yorkshire's fantastic to gig in. I can't shut them up. London's fine, but it's the 'burbs where people don't want to leave themselves open to ridicule."

Born in Co Wicklow, the son of a trade union negotiator, O Briain was sent to an Irish-speaking school and, though his mother never learned the language, he and his father still only converse in Irish. "The school I went to was full of argument, discussion and debate because everyone came from that kind of background." "I wasn't a class clown," he continues. "I was quite quiet and nerdy and into science. I felt I was shy, but who at 15 or 16 doesn't think they are shy? A lot of the reason I took great glee in my 20s in discovering I liked talking in front of audiences was that contrast in how awkward and self-conscious I felt as a teenager."

He went on to University College, Dublin, where he gained a degree in maths and theoretical physics. Joining the college debating society gave him an outlet for comic speeches, he recalls. Then he went on open mic nights, where you'd have a five-minute slot at a pub or a club.

"The ratio of bombing never fully goes away. At the start, one- in-six gigs would go badly, then you get better, so it's one in nine, then one in 20. I don't know what number I'm on at the moment but it's still there. That never goes away. You get better at devising a way out if it's going badly. You get better at knowing when to throw your script and go into street- fighting mode."

For a while he became a children's presenter on Irish TV before gaining success on the Irish comedy circuit. His one-man shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival got him noticed, but it was with BBC Two's Mock The Week, the topical panel show -- a mix of Have I Got News For You? and Whose Line Is It Anyway? -- that his profile reached new heights. "It's made me better known, which is an advantage in terms of getting bums on seats for my shows."

He is also a frequent guest panellist on QI, hosted by Stephen Fry, and appears occasionally on Just a Minute on BBC Radio Four, but is thankful that he is recognised far less in London, where he has lived for seven years, than in Dublin. "If people think they know me, I say, 'I was in your class at school' which usually buys me half a second and by the time I've gone, the penny drops. But at 37 I'm past the stage when I'm going to become really famous. There's a whole celebrity industry which I don't court and which doesn't have any interest in me and doesn't need me. Nobody is wondering what nightclubs I spill out of or where I go on my holidays."

So secretive is he about his personal life that he has dedicated his book to big S (it's been reported that his wife's name is Susan and she's a doctor) and little o, presumably his young daughter's initial. He won't tell me her name. "I am currently engaged in a lifelong project to have a successful career that never involves using your private life in any way."

He's currently working on another series of Three Men In A Boat, with Griff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath, in which they will be venturing by boat from Dublin to the Atlantic in 12 days. Next spring he'll be embarking on another stand-up tour, which is where he seems most at home. "I don't have a need or hunger to be that kind of BBC One household name or to be a celebrity or to be on Strictly Come Dancing."

In fact, during the interval of one gig he checked his emails and found that he'd been asked to appear on Strictly Come Dancing. "I announced turning it down to a crowd in Dublin -- and that got the best cheer of the night."

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Dara O Briain interview
Michael Deacon meets 6ft 4in comedian and physics nerd Dara O Briain as he enters the world of The Apprentice
05 Oct 2010
telegraph.co.uk

He’s unusual, Dara O Briain. Physically, to start with. Six feet four, with that doorman’s torso, shoulders broad as a wardrobe, shoes the size of canoes – yet despite the looming bulk, he seems harmless, gentle, like some great grazing brontosaur. Bald but for a few wisps the light catches, he looks older than 38. At one early stand-up gig, he asked the audience to guess his age; they almost all said late thirties. He was 29. His demeanour is unusual, too, at least for a comedian: he’s at ease with people. He exhibits none of that tightly coiled intensity, that jittering neediness you see in most stand-ups – you can imagine having a relaxed chin-wag with him over a beer, which you suspect you couldn’t with Lee Evans or Ricky Gervais. He’s courteous without a globule of oiliness: we meet at lunch, and when the waitress arrives with his main course it’s: “You’re a legend. Thank you very, very much.”

But what really marks him out is his style of comedy. Good though he is at panel show bantering – he presents Mock the Week and occasionally Have I Got News for You – he’s most at home doing stand-up. On stage, he’s a logician, a rationalist, a geek: he’ll take a topic (the fairy tale about the three bears, say, or a risible Hollywood disaster movie) and dissect it with surgical relish, scrutinising its absurdities and inconsistencies, like a comedy scientist. Perhaps it’s because he actually is a scientist.

But more of that in a minute. On Wednesday, O Briain begins a new presenting job: The Apprentice is back, and he’s replacing Adrian Chiles as host of You’re Fired!, its sister show, in which each week he’ll ask the latest discarded candidate about their business bunglings. “It’s the closest I’ve come to standard, non-comedy TV presentation,” he says, “but it is a relatively light-hearted show – it’s not like I’m presenting Newsnight.”

He’s long been a fan of The Apprentice, Lord Sugar’s entrepreneurial talent contest, in part because of how amusingly conceited he finds so many of its candidates. “The whole 'I’ll do anything, anything’ stuff – that pleading is just a grown-up version of The X Factor kids going: 'This has been my dream.’ There’s nothing worse than those kids – you’re 14, last year your dream was a pony, next year you’ll have another dream. At least The Apprentice people have worked a while.”

At the time of our interview, O Briain has yet to meet Lord Sugar and is pondering what to talk about when he does – probably not football, because O Briain’s team (Arsenal) have just thrashed Sugar’s (Tottenham). Anyway, he doesn’t see You’re Fired! as a route into mainstream television, the way his fellow stand-up Jason Manford has moved into The One Show. “You have to let people know the one thing you do and I’m a comedian – you can’t muddy that, or people will go: 'You’re that guy who does Homes Under the Hammer.’ I’m first and foremost a touring comic.”

As a boy, he’d never have guessed that one day he’d be saying that. Raised in County Wicklow, Ireland, the son of a trades union negotiator, he was a “gauche, shy, insecure” teenager and a swot – “I wanted to be a physicist, doing quantum mechanics with a chalk and blackboard in a lab.” He didn’t think of himself as funny. But when he arrived at University College, Dublin, to study maths and theoretical physics, he joined the debating society, and was eaten up with envy for its members’ social confidence – “and envy is a great motivator”. He gave debating a go and loved it, feeling “the release of no longer thinking, 'Oh God, everyone’s looking at me and I’ve got a spot and I’m the ugliest boy in class’.”

After university he had a spell as a “mediocre” children’s television presenter in Ireland (it’s hard to picture him as a frothy Fearne Cotton type, but at least he had hair then) and did open mic spots at comedy clubs. Anxiety devoured him. “I remember the first time I did what I might loosely term a professional gig, I walked around a small suburb of Dublin beforehand for four hours. Just nerves. I was on stage for five minutes. The nerves to time-on-stage ratio was insanely skewed.” Yet still, somehow, he enjoyed it, and gradually found both his voice and success: his first Have I Got News for You slot was in 2003 and he started Mock the Week in 2005. As well as filming You’re Fired!, he’s on a 110-date tour, but says it doesn’t stop him seeing his wife and their two-year-old daughter – he drives home to London from almost every gig, even if it’s as far as Manchester, just to be around in the morning “to do normal daddy stuff”.

O Briain agrees his stand-up is “forensic” in style – “and more and more nerdy as I get older”. “The routine [in his current set] about NCT antenatal classes, the routine about video games – I could be back in the student union bar talking to physicists. I don’t know whether it’s because of the blogosphere or Twitter, but nerds have become more vocal. There’s Ben Goldacre’s book [Bad Science], that whole kind of atheist, secular, rationalist strain,” he says. He’s an atheist himself, like most scientists but not like most sons of God-fearing Irish Catholics. “For some people, religion is the answer to a question, but I don’t even have the question, don’t have any need for an explanation. My mother’s term is 'pagan’: 'Oh, you’re a bloody pagan.’ I think [my parents] both think at some level that my eternal soul is in damnation but that I seem to be happy enough, so fine…”

If they think atheism deserves damnation, I wonder what they make of Mock the Week, the coarsest comedy on television. Its most controversial star, Frankie Boyle (he of the rude gags about Rebecca Adlington and the Queen), quit last year, and O Briain admits the show “could have done with being a little less vicious – Frankie’s brilliant at what he does but there’s no need for the rest of us to follow him into that”. In comedy generally, he adds: “I do think there are too many rape jokes around. It’s become an unfortunate badge of honour among young comics to assert their 'darkness’. And there is nothing less interesting than a 21 year-old, straight out of college, with a joke whose emotional heft he has no idea about. There are topics I wouldn’t personally go into.”

He does do quite a lot of swearing, mind you. What does his mother say after she sees him on stage? “She has a very charming line she did a number of years ago when somebody said: 'Did you understand it all?’ And she said: 'I couldn’t hear most of it.’ Sidestepped very nicely.”

The Apprentice returns on Wednesday on BBC One at 9pm; The Apprentice: You’re Fired! follows on BBC Two at 10pm. The DVD Dara O Briain Live 2010 is out on November 22