Browsing Tag

Comedy

Arts

Look Out! Irish Comedy Tour Heading This Way

Comic Pat Godwin was the song parody guy on the old Morning Zoo radio show in Philadelphia. (Not a mug shot.)

Comic Pat Godwin was the song parody guy on the old Morning Zoo radio show in Philadelphia. (Not a mug shot.)

Did you ever sit around with your Irish-American friends, cracking each other up with stories from your childhood? The crazy relatives. The wise-cracking relatives. The relatives who never met a mixed drink they didn’t like.

Pat Godwin and Derek Richards did, and even though they grew up in different Irish Catholic neighborhoods—Godwin in Wilkes-Barre, Richards in Detroit—they found they lived on common ground. “We all realized we had relatives with drinking problems—I know, go figure, who saw that coming?” quips Richards. “The funniest thing though was when we all realized we had mug shots. We’d all been arrested at some point. It was not like we’d ever hijacked an armored car, but we’d all been in the situation where we’d had too much booze with the wrong people.”

Then, they took this conversation on the road.

Godwin (you may remember him as the song parodist from the John DeBella Morning Zoo and later the Howard Stern radio shows) and Richards, along with Jim Paquette and Mike McCarthy are the comics that make up The Irish Comedy Tour (‘they’re Irish, they’re American, and they’re not holding back”). Godwin, Richards, and Paquette will be bringing it to the Sellersville Theatre on Sunday, October 25.

The four met on the comedy circuit, and one thing led to another. Listen to Richards and see if any of this sounds familiar:

“We were sharing stories over some Jameson and some beer and we started noticing a common thread in personal backgrounds. And I thought, can we take what we talk and joke about here and bring it to stage?”

They could. The Irish Comedy Tour started in 2005 as a one-off St, Paddy’s Day thing. This year, it’s taking its nose-bashing, (you have to check out their website to get that one) Irish-pubby sense of humor from Michigan to Key West. “It’s kind of like an Irish pub and comedy show that you put in a food processor,” says Richards, who was a semi-finalist in Comedy Central’s Open Mic Fight.

Paquette and Godwin are both musicians as well, so there are some tunes in that comedy Cuisinart too. “Pat does a hilarious song about the lack of birth control in the Irish community called ’13 Kids and Counting.’ He also does a version of ‘Black Velvet Band,’ with a comedic twist,” Richards says. (Few songs deserve it more.)

If you saw “Last Comic Standing,” you saw judge and “Cheers” alumn John Ratzenberger nearly swallow his mustache when contestant Godwin started singing that pre-K favorite, “Bingo (was His Name-O)” as Bono (“this is for all the dogs in shelters!”). “That was funny,” Ratzenberger said as Godwin left the stage.

In fact, Godwin started as a musician before he turned to stand-up and acting. “I was playing down at Smokey Joe’s at Penn and it was pretty clear what they wanted was cover songs and things they could sing to. But I was talking in between the songs, satirizing rock and roll stars and singing funny stuff, and that turned into my act. [Philadelphia comedian] Todd Glass saw me and suggested I do an open mike and that’s how I was hired to do the DeBella show.”

When the Morning Zoo was shuttered, Godwin turned to the guy who was to blame, Howard Stern, who hired him to churn out topical song parodies for his pre-satellite radio morning show. “I left there and moved to LA,” Godwin says. “I didn’t do any more songs. I had a few failed pilots, knocked around LA with my girlfriend at the time, wasn’t successful at much of anything. I failed in LA once as an actor at 18, then as a songwriter at 26, then again as a comedian. It’s LA 3, Pat Godwin, zero.”

But now he’s on the Irish Comedy Tour, and things couldn’t be better. Both he and Richards say this is the most fun they have all year. They get to reach deep back into their childhoods and bring up the funniest bits, even the ones that weren’t funny at the time.

“For me,” says Richards, “a lot of it is the sense of humor I grew up with. My grandfather was my biggest comedy influence. Growing up, down in the basement in my mother and father’s house, myself and my brother would listen to Dad and Grandpa trade the most wrong jokes ever. (Even though it’s an adult show, we won’t be doing any of those.) As long as we never told our mother and grandmother, we could stay down there and listen.”

Godwin, who is a descendant of the writer Mary Shelley (“Frankenstein”), grew up with “the drinking thing.”

“I mind my Ps and Qs with alcohol, because I’ve seen a lot of smart, creative people ruin their lives,” he says. “On the road I drive for those two wackos so they can tear it up after the show.” But he’s found a way to give it a comic spin. “I wrote a song called, ‘Switch to Beer,’ about the way some Irish people handle their drinking problems—putting down the whiskey and switching to beer. It came from seeing the Irish actor Richard Harris in the Bahamas, completely bombed, after he’d been on the Letterman show a week before talking about how he’d solved his hard drinking problem. I went up to him at the roulette table where he was completely trashed and I asked him about it. He said he stopped drinking the hard stuff. He switched to beer.”

So, by now you’ve figured out that the Irish Comedy Tour isn’t the place to take the kiddies. “This sense of humor is part of our upbringing, which might be a little off-color and politically incorrect, but it’s not dirty,” says Richards. “It’s all in good taste.”

And, he says, it might remind you of sitting around with your pals at a pub, sharing a frosty one and some memories. “People come up to us after the show, even people right from Ireland, and tell us this is everything they talk about,” he says. “It’s a fun party atmosphere. It’s a party—that’s the best way to describe it.”

October 13, 2009 by
Arts

The Kings of Irish Comedy

Ardal O’Hanlon is explaining the difference between his comedy and that of his two companions—Dylan Moran and Tommy Tiernan, the reigning triumverate of the Irish comic scene known collectively as “The Fellas” who are headlining at The Troc in Philadelphia on Wednesday night. It’s clear he’s given it a great deal of serious thought.

“We’re quite different really,” says O’Hanlon perhaps best known in the States for his turn as the “incredibly silly stupid priest,” Father Dougal, in the BBC series, “Father Ted.” (Think Jessica Simpson’s brain in the head of a good-looking young guy in a cassock and collar.)

“Tommy Tiernan is very radical, radically different from myself, extremely high energy, bares his soul on stage. He’s quite shocking in some ways [The Irish Senate twice accused him of blasphemy], but immensely popular in Ireland. He represents the counterculture. He’s like a messiah to some people in Ireland. Tommy for them speaks the truth and I suppose he goes where other comics do not dare to tread.”

And Dylan Moran, whom most American audiences know from his roles in the Simon Pegg comedies, “Shaun of the Dead,” and “Run Fatboy Run”? “Dylan is a very cerebral comic. For me, he is occasionally profound in ways other comics aren’t. He has an Oscar Wildian wit. He’s always been one of my favorite comics. He has a lovely way with words, a lot of integrity, he doesn’t pander to the masses.”

As for himself, O’Hanlon seems to have given that less thought. “I find it hard to describe my own style,” he admits. “It’s observational, deadpan in tone, surreal around the edges. That’s it in a nutshell.”

One of six children of prominent Irish Fianna Fail politician, Dr. Rory O’Hanlon and his wife, Teresa, the Monaghan-born Ardal O’Hanlon says he’s not sure why he wound up in comedy. His siblings found their way into medicine, politics, and accounting (“They seemed like good jobs until a year ago—who’s laughing now?”), and he was by his own admission “a quiet, shy boy, always doodling with a pen” who wanted to be a writer. Then, in college in the 80s, he fell in with funny companions. Inspired by the exuberant young British comedy scene, they founded one of Ireland’s first comedy clubs, The Comedy Cellar, in Dublin.

“It was a tiny club, haphazardly and badly organized, and we would get only about 50 people there on a Wednesday night,” O’Hanlon recalls. It all might have died there had O’Hanlon and company not done what millions of Irish have done over the last several hundred years: emigrate. “Not till we moved to London enmasse did we take off. Like New York at one time, London was alive with comedy clubs where every serious comic wanted to go.”

A comedy diaspora? Growing up in pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, O’Hanlon says, “you assumed you were going to leave. It wasn’t even daunting. It was accepted. It’s what we do.” (In one of his earlier monologues, O’Hanlon quipped that he was “typically Irish, really in the sense that I don’t live there anymore.”)

Though his father was a doctor—and government minister—they weren’t rich by any means, so O’Hanlon and his siblings worked over school holidays to make money to pay for their education. “Ireland was a pretty poor country in the 80s and 90s, and on an average doctor’s salary, you can’t put six children though college,” he says. Hence, on his resume, a stint at a British pea cannery and a season on an Irish pig farm. A pig farm? “I grew up in a pig-farming area of Ireland,” he explains. “It was a good thing. In a way, everything was easier after that. I knew it was one of the things I never wanted to do again, and although I’ve been in some horrific dressing rooms, nothing is as bad as a slurry-covered truck.”

And the move to London in 1994 was a boon too. “There you could pit your wits against the best in the business and you only got better.”

After a couple of years on the UK comedy circuit, “Father Ted” came along: a sitcom about a group of priests living on a remote island (Craggy Island) off the West coast of Ireland. O’Hanlon landed the role as Father Dougal McGuire, the simple-minded, rollerblading, non-religious priest whose choice of career bewilders Father Ted Creely “Dougal, how did you get into the church in the first place? Was it, like, ‘collect 12 crisp packets and become a priest?’”

Dougal’s failure to grasp even the rudiments of his calling endeared him to viewers.

Dougal: God, I’ve heard about those cults, Ted. People dressing up in black and saying ‘Our Lord’s going to come back and save us all.’
Ted: No, Dougal, that’s us. That’s Catholicism.
Dougal: Oh right.

But the wackadoodle priest was almost too beloved. When the series ended in 1998, O’Hanlon took his stand-up act on the road and almost quit the business when well-meaning Dougal fans wanted him to be “a cuddly priest”, not the “everyman sliding toward middle age, a man confused by the world around him” he is in both his act and in real life.

“There are certain traces of me in Father Dougal,” admits O’Hanlon, who also says he based his character on “watching dogs a lot. Dougal has a lot of dog-like naivete.

“When I first started doing stand-up I was more wide-eyed and more confused than I am now. But I still think one of the things I like about comedy is the naivete and innocence, and it’s not something I’d like to lose entirely either—this way of looking at the world from an almost almost alien perspective. For me it’s true, I genuinely am confused. The reason I love stand-up is that it’s a way to deal the nonsense.”

He eventually left the road but stayed in the business, doing two more series. He had more dramatic role in the British show, “Big Bad World,” and then he was “sucked back into fluffy sitcom land” with “My Hero,” about an alien who falls in love with a human nurse, “a shameless ripoff,” of Robin Williams’ career-making “Mork and Mindy.”

Aside from the steady paycheck and the “companionship,” series work has its perks. “You’re pampered. People bring you fruit. That doesn’t happen in stand-up,” says O’Hanlon. “Standup is more of a solitary existence. The writing side of it as well. You spend a lot of time navel gazing. That’s one reason that all of us [he, Moran and Tiernan] are happy to go on the road together.”

You can see “The Fellas” on Wednesday night, starting at 7 PM, at the Trocadero at 1003 Arch Street. See our calendar for the details.

June 5, 2009 by