Ass kicking

All fired up for her Galway show, Bridget Christie tells LAUREN MURPHYhow her new routine War Donkey was inspired by Col Gadafy blaming his downfall on donkeys

WHEN YOU grow up as the youngest of nine children, explains Bridget Christie, choosing a career like comedy – where holding the attention of a crowd is paramount – is down to more than mere providence. “There was a game, actually, called ‘Ignore Bridge’ and another one called ‘Spy on Bridge’, and because no one would listen to what I was saying, I remember doing increasingly more absurd things to try to get peoples’ attention. But everyone was like that, actually – all my brothers and sisters. My brother jumped off a roof once with an umbrella, because he thought he’d float. We used to do things like that all the time. It was,” she says of her formative years in Gloucester with a soft, wheezy chuckle, “a very interesting childhood.”

The large number of children makes sense when you learn that the bubbly, cheerful Christie is the product of an Irish Catholic upbringing. With a mother hailing from Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim, and a father from Boyle, Co Roscommon, her enduring faith formed the basis of last year’s Surrealist Housewife show.

The route taken to crafting her new show War Donkey, on the other hand, was less linear. Inspired by a newspaper article about Col Gadafy blaming donkeys for his downfall. It was around the time that Spielberg’s adaptation of War Horse was released. She thought there was a lot of emphasis on horses during wars, but not enough on donkeys. The show – written half in character as a retired war donkey named Jason who is now working as a stand-up – is indicative of Christie’s surrealist stance. In the past, she has dressed up as human-sized ant – reprising the character for a recurring role on Harry Hill’s Little Internet Show.

Yet, there’s only so far a show about donkeys will take you. Equine war stories and feminism aren’t usually thematic bed- fellows, but Christie stumbled across the concept almost by accident. “I really quickly realised that there was only really about 10 minutes in the idea, not an hour,” she laughs. “Or 10 funny minutes, anyway – the rest was all a bit grim. So, I’d do that piece at the beginning, and the other 50 minutes would be about women’s issues. I consciously avoided gender-specific material in the past, because it’s not something that I ever thought I would do – until four things happened to me on the same day, and they really shocked me, actually. And I started noticing more and more things in daily life, and it got me thinking about where we are at the moment.”

The “women in comedy” debate is touched upon during the show, too. “I can’t open a paper without seeing something about the ‘are women funny?’ debate,” she nods. “I mean, Germaine Greer got into a lot of trouble a while back, when she said in The Guardian that women weren’t funny because they couldn’t remember punchlines.

“And then you’ve got this idiot Hollywood bigwig journalist in LA, Nikki Finke, who said that only ugly women could be funny. D’you know something, I don’t even know where to begin. Some women are not funny, and some women are – it’s not a gender thing.

“I don’t know when this misogyny started creeping back into comedy. I think it’s partly the PC backlash; it’s sort of becoming ironic to do a show that’s a bit racist or misogynistic, and to attack the weakest and then say ‘I’m only joking’. But I don’t think that’s quite good enough, really. I don’t believe in there being topics that cannot be touched – I don’t think you can legislate that, and you have to be very careful about freedom of speech. So you can make jokes about rape and cancer and domestic violence, but they have to be bloody good. You can’t just say something offensive without there being any point to it.”

Balancing thought-provoking issues with comedy is a relatively new development in Christie’s repertoire. “My earlier shows were not like that; they were much more character-based, and much, much sillier.

“But what happened was, even though the shows seemed to go down OK, they weren’t generating any work for me. So over the last few years, I’ve tried to have a balance of the things that I really enjoy doing, but are really quite silly and a bit more physical, with material that people might be able to use in other places. And also, because I’m 41 now, I think as you get older, you want to talk about stuff that’s important – but you have to make it funny. You can’t just do a lecture that’s slightly witty at some points; you have to remember that it’s a comedy show, and there has to be lots of jokes in it. So how I get around that is I’ll tell them a fact or statistic or something that’s happened, and I’ll do a crap joke at the end of it so they’ll remember it when they get home,” she chuckles.

As serious as the subjects of her shows can get, there is still always room for, as one review put it, “fart jokes”.

“If it was up to me, I’d probably just keep doing really stupid hour-long shows where I’m just in a series of ridiculous costumes and doing nonsense. But the thing is, you get to a point where you say ‘OK – is this now financially viable, or is it a hobby?” she says, emitting another one of those infectious wheezy laughs. “ I’m also at the age now where I don’t care if I’m annoying people, y’know? This is my opinion and this is what’s happening, and if you don’t like it, well . . . sorry, but you’ve read the blurb on the programme, and it does say ‘What are Tory feminists?’. I hope it’s funny anyway.”

* Bridget Christie's War Donkey plays at Galway's Taibhdhearc Theatre on October 25th. See galwaycomedyfestival.com