There is nothing he adores more than a theatre. As he prepared for the 65-date tour of his new show, Crowd Tickler, Dara said he could not contain his excitement about treading the boards once more.
‘The other day I sat in an empty theatre thinking, I just love these rooms. I’m on the board of the Theatres Trust in order to protect these wonderful buildings. It still gives me such a thrill to walk on stage.’
Dubbed ‘the king of audience inter-action’, he excels at rapid-fire exchanges with his fans and delivers a dazzling mixture of witty, daring, thought-provoking and hilarious anecdotes. There is no other comedian quite like him. The Guardian declared: ‘These are classy routines that assume the audience’s intelligence and condescend to no one’, while The Times described his live show as ‘typically brilliant’.
Dara, who grew up in Dublin and has been called Britain’s favourite Irishman by The Irish Independent, couldn’t resist returning to touring because live comedy is ‘addictive’.
‘When you arrive at an empty theatre, the potential is immense. You think, this is going to be magical,’ beams Dara, whose mastery of live comedy is underlined by his four stand-up DVDs. ‘Then, when the show starts and you hear those waves of laughter in the auditorium, it’s just so enjoyable. It’s a huge rush.’
The other element of stand-up that he relishes is its spontaneity. ‘I love the fact that you can shape the entire evening by thinking on your feet. If Plan A doesn’t work, you have to come up with Plan B immediately.’
Dara (42), who is married with two young children, adds that his improvised riffing with the audience creates a tremendous frisson. ‘It’s like walking a tightrope. The audience love it because they can see you’ve got nothing up your sleeve and that things could very easily go wrong. They realise that this could go anywhere.
‘But you’re not given any easy ride. When I’m questioning the audience, my stance is not how can I mock this person? It’s more like I am an eight-year-old meeting this person for the first time, so what aspects of them do I want to enthuse about?’
The comic, a graduate from University College Dublin in mathematics and theoretical physics, who has drawn on that background to present such TV shows as Dara O’Briain: School of Hard Sums and Dara O’Briain’s Science Club, says that his audience never lets him down.
‘Everyone has something to give me. The other day one guy in the audience told me he had a very dull job in HR. He said he was the comptroller – no one ever knows what that means. But it then emerged that in fact he worked in HR for a chocolate company. So I came up with the idea that he would put a large bowl of chocolate down on the desk in front of a potential employee, and then turn away. When he turned back, if the potential employee hadn’t got chocolate all over his face, then he’d get the job. If you can survive in an arena of grabbable chocolate without taking any, then you’re the man for the job.’
‘I then thought that his friend might work for a toothpaste company. How great that they could put aside their differences, despite working in jobs that nullify each other. It would be like a tobacconist being friends with a lung transplant surgeon. As long as they don’t talk about work, they’ll be fine.’
Dara outlines the themes he will be discussing in Crowd Tickler. ‘I’ll be talking about the awkward conversations we will have about grandchildren, about all the resources we’ve used up and all the wonderful advances we’ve casually wasted, like Concorde and the space shuttle.’
Dara, who in 2012 had the honour of presenting the Bafta TV Awards on BBC1 and being a nominee, said: ‘I always enjoy demolishing idiotic arguments. It suits comedy. If you take it to its logical conclusion, it’s madness. It’s a reductio ad absurdum.’
But despite his wonderfully clever routines, the show is first and foremost about jokes. He wants the audience for Crowd Tickler to roar with laughter. ‘It’s great to tackle subjects that are more thought-provoking, but I have this dread that people will go, “Oh, Dara’s show, there’ll be some bit where he bores us with some science thing”.’
He was last in Jersey in 2012 with his Craic Dealer tour, an evening that was a sell-out. Of Crowd Tickler, he adds: ‘I make points here and there, but that’s secondary. Above all, I hope it’s a great night’s entertainment. I hope people walk out and say, Dara’s still got it. I hope he doesn’t leave it another three years! If they do that, I’ll be delighted.’
- Dara OBriain performs at Fort Regent on Friday 29 May. Details of the Crowd Tickler tour can be found at offthekerb.co.uk.
FORT Regent was clearly the place to be on Saturday night.
Almost 2,000 people headed out in force to witness Mock The Week front man Dara O’Briain’s stand-up show.
So popular was the Irish funnyman’s performance in fact – it was apparently the first time that every seat in the venue had been sold – that even my JEP reviewers tickets had been re-sold at the final hour, resulting in some last minute replacements having to be set up at the side of the Great Hall.
But it wasn’t difficult to see why the comedian, who also hosts The Apprentice, You’re Fired, had attracted such a large – and varied – crowd.
For two and a half hours he barely stopped for breath and had people in tears of laughter with his frantic, lightening-speed style of comedy.
Despite a tendency to ramble at times, Dara never failed to impress when he reached his punch-lines and he deserved a medal for the sheer pace of his routine.
Having previously performed at Fort Regent on a couple of occasions, Dara bounded onto the stage – without even bothering with a warm up act – to declare: ‘It’s a real pleasure to be back. Of all the gigs I’ve played in ancient forts looking down onto towns this is definitely in the top three’.
He quickly picked up on the fact that the Great Hall was ‘obviously a basketball arena’ and said that it was difficult for him to resist the temptation to turn the night into a giant Zumba class.
Proving himself to be incredibly quick-witted, much of the first half of Dara’s show revolved around the occupations of the people in the front row.
Poor Dan, the marketing man for a local internet plant order website, got a particular hammering for only knowing one kind of plant that his company sold.
Dara then took the joke one step further by later declaring, in the show’s encore, that he had been on their website during the interval, before proceeding to read out everything they sold.
‘Maybe Dan is actually the most amazing marketer there is,’ he then mused, ‘as I’ve just plugged everything that his company sells.’
The comedian, who is now three months into his tour, Craic Dealer, had clearly done his research, and as a result Jersey’s 40-mile-per-hour speed limit got a ripping, while the inter-Channel Island rivalry was also touched upon.
Also coming under attack were some of the things that the comedian refers to as his ‘nerd rants’, including astrology – but definitely not astronomy – TV psychics (in particular Sally Morgan), and nativity plays in non-Christian schools.
‘There are plenty of other Christmas stories, they could do,’ he mused, ‘like A Christmas Carol, It’s A Wonderful Life, or Die Hard.’
