A howl, not a laugh

Matt Lucas, Paul Merton and Jimmy Carr are regulars at London's Comedy Store for the midnight show Full Mooners. Dublin comedian Andrew Maxwell, whose weird idea it was, tells Brian Boydabout bringing the show back to his home town

So what happens at a Count Dracula Hip-Hop Muppet Show? Easy. The host dresses in a cape, the only stage furniture is a large moon, and the audience don't laugh - instead they howl at the moon if something meets their approval. There's a resident singer and breakdancing troupe, and the comedians get paid in champagne. It sounds like a right laugh, which is probably why acts such as Little Britain's Matt Lucas, Paul Merton and Jimmy Carr regularly head to London's Comedy Store every Thursday for the midnight show known as Full Mooners.

Established two years ago by Dublin comic Andrew Maxwell, Full Mooners is a gig with a difference. The acts on the bill are actively persuaded, if not threatened, to ditch their usual routines and do something more in keeping with the Full Mooners' "live and dangerous" ethos. To this end, you might get Ed Byrne dressed as Prince doing Purple Rain, some impromptu naked wrestling or Australian comic Brendon Burns performing his set while doing a gym work-out.

"It began, strangely enough, when I was doing my solo show at London's Soho Theatre," says Maxwell. "The idea there is that you go on after the play, and there isn't any time to remove the stage props that were there before you. I went on after a play about wrestling, so the stage manager handed me a cape to wear. I turned up in my cape at the nearby Comedy Store and asked the owner if he had any free weekly slots for a completely different sort of night which would attract a very different sort of crowd and had the acts do very weird things. The only slot he had going was the midnight one on a Thursday night - so we piled straight in."

Having worked on the London comedy scene for the past 10 years, Maxwell knew he could just make a few phone calls and attract the best comedy talent to play the gig, on the proviso that that they did something "a bit different and a lot weird". He was wary, though, of turning the show into a comedian's love-in and playing only to the converted. "We're right in the middle of the West End and what I do every Thursday night is I go outside and do the flyers for the show - hoping to attract the sort of West End person who has never been to a comedy show before," he says. "I also have a guy who is fluent in Portuguese, so he goes after the Portuguese tourists and I have a guy who's fluent in Urdu, so he goes after the Asian crowd.

"I knew it was working when after a few weeks I arrived on stage and found myself confronted by 25 British Army paratroopers sitting in the first few rows who had just got back from Afghanistan. Sitting behind them were a bunch of Goths who were already howling at the moon. I just thought: paratroopers, Goths, me an Irish comic dressed in a cape . . . this is what I wanted from the start."

Maxwell puts Full Mooners's growing popularity down to the facts that it is a contemporary spin on the old free-flowing jazz club idea and the audience is part of the show.

"The audience is vital," he says. "The truth of the matter is that most comedy shows are populated by white, left-leaning, Guardian-reading twenty- and thirtysomethings. I certainly didn't want that. On any given night you might find a bunch of pissed Irish tourists who are wandering around the West End and recognise me from RTÉ's The Panel, so they might come in, then it might be someone such as Jade Goody who tried to barge her way in but we threw her out. On another night, it could be, as happened not so long ago, all of the Arctic Monkeys."

One of Maxwell's more imaginative ventures for the club got him into trouble with the law. "I decided to have this night called 'Whitey Gotta Pay' and the rule was that all white customers had to pay while black and Asian people got in free," he says. "Not only did the white people have to pay but they also had to pay an extra surcharge which was a type of reprobation tax for the sins of their colonial ancestors. It went down a storm but then halfway through the show, the police arrived and told me I was in breach of racial discrimination laws by not charging black and Asian people. How bloody ridiculous is that."

One of Full Mooners, more remarkable rules is the one that states that no heckler or rowdy audience member can be thrown out. "That one can be difficult at times," he says. "One night, I was doing my set and there was a bunch of very pissed Northern Irish people in. I seemed to be upsetting them with what I was saying and one guy stood up and said: 'If ever you come to [ a certain place in the North], I'll have you shot.' He seemed to be very serious about this. I just told him to look around him. I explained to him that we weren't in [ that certain Northern Irish place] now, we were in the West End of London, and if I wanted to I could get him strangled and raped by a local West End tramp for less than a fiver.

"You have to remember that the show starts at midnight and the bar is open until 3am, so there is going to be a certain level of exuberance. But instead of throwing people out, I just order them to go to the bar. I patiently explain to them that, given the state they're in, if I did throw them out and they continued to behave in that manner in the street outside, they would probably get knifed. I just tell them to calm down and come back to the gig when they feel ready."

Apart from the usual Comedy Store slot, Maxwell also brings Full Mooners up to the Edinburgh Festival each year, where the usual mayhem is multiplied by 100.

Tomorrow night Full Mooners make its Irish debut at Dublin's Vicar Street. All the regulars - singer Lady Carol, the breakdancers One Motion Crew - will be there, as well as some surprise guests. "It's going to be like a comedy séance," he says. "But with extra howling."

Andrew Maxwell's Full Mooners, Vicar Street, tomorrow 11.59pm