Dropping all pretence

'My work is a celebration of pointlessness,' David O'Doherty tells Brian Boyd.And why not?

YOU’RE NOBODY as a comic these days unless you are touring arena- sized venues, have a multi-tiered merchandising stall and are outselling whoever won last year’s X Factor at the box office. But don’t expect David O’Doherty – one of the big draws at this year’s festival – to be stadium rockin’ any time soon. “I hate comedy in arenas. It’s a terrible idea” he says. “Unless you doing an actual arena show, like The Mighty Boosh did with four trucks of gear, you really shouldn’t do arenas. I mean how much money do you need to earn in one night?”

Despite still seeming like the new kid on the block, O’Doherty, 35, is somewhat of a veteran. It’s more than 12 years since he won his first award at the Edinburgh Fringe and he’s been around long enough to witness the shifting dynamics of stand-up comedy. Including this current explosion.

“There’s a new career path for comedians in the UK now,” he says. “There’s now so much stand-up on telly, they want new faces – tellyfodder. You can go on there and, if you’re not ready, really make a dick out of yourself. And with the number of times it’ll be repeated and YouTubed, you’ll never get away from it. The advantage of starting the way I did is that, when I was rubbish, at least I was being rubbish to eight people in a room above a bike shop in Edinburgh.”

As O’Doherty’s touring schedule now looks like a frequent-flyer programme with regular stints in Australia and the US, he has a simple equation for comedy success. “The trick is to go back every year, or every couple of years with a new show. You can only really tell how tonight’s gig went when you see how many turn up in 12 months time. There is added pressure in having to write a better show every year, but it speeds up your development. In America, with a few exceptions, people turn over a new hour every five years. I’ve written a new hour every year for the last eight years. And they are definitely getting better. I listened to five minutes of the 2003 show recently. Whoa, that was a stinky mess.”

With his trusty Casio keyboard and specialising in what he always referred to as “very low-energy musical whimsy”, O’Doherty found his own space pretty early on and if anything, built his reputation by word of mouth. The Edinburgh Fringe was always a happy hunting ground for him. In 2006, he was nominated for the main Edinburgh comedy award and he went on to win the award in 2008.

“Winning the big comedy prize in Edinburgh has certainly made things easier,” he says. “People in the UK take your ludicrous ideas more seriously. The London people with the expensive glasses pretend they’ve been big fans for years. It means you can travel to, say, Bristol, and two hundred people will turn up.”

He’s expanded his base considerably over the past few years. Regular appearances at the Melbourne Comedy Festival have made him “big in Australia” and he’s even trudged around the Outback putting on shows.

“There’s a special excitement to doing comedy in far away places,” he says. “If it goes well you feel a kind of universal bond with the co-citizens of planet earth. We aren’t so different after all! We all laugh at the same things: farts and people falling over. But then if it goes badly, you feel this dreadful loneliness – nobody understands me; why did I come here. Such a long way to die on my hole...”

He’s certainly earned his stage miles and all the experience has brought a sharper focus to his material and presentation. One of his great strengths is how he constantly updates and acknowledges fresh developments – whether they be breaking news stories or just the latest tech-fetish gizmo to hit the shops.

And there’s always fresh ground to be turned: “This year I wrote my first character show, Rory Sheridan’s Tales of The Antarctica at the Edinburgh and Dublin Fringes,” he says. “I learned so much doing it. I learned that my main acting device – to show emotion of any kind – is to shout. I learned how to pace a single narrative for an hour. I learned that a man from 1917 should not wear a Swatch. But I’m pretty sure some of the theatricality of that will trickle down into the stand up. Or at least, I’ll be less scared by the idea of everyone not laughing every 15 seconds.”

Next up is the US comedy circuit. “This year I’ve finally got the visa to play in America, so I’ve been working with a few people over there: Demetri Martin, Kristen Schaal. They come at it from a very different angle to my friends over here. I am learning a lot from it.”

He still, though, isn’t quite sure what’s he doing. “There are times when I see my friends who are nurses or teachers and think, what am I doing with my life? These people are helping. I’ve just written a fact about how Great Whites never attack swimmers wearing gingham togs. But then I look at the work of Sean Hillen, or reading the Flann O’Brien stuff that has been in the paper recently, and I remember how that stuff has cheered me up so much when I’ve been down.

“You could say it’s pointless – you could say that about most of my work – but it’s a celebration of pointlessness. It’s a dog in sunglasses. It’s a giant pencil. It’s a person with a surname that sounds like ‘wanger’ ....”

See David O’Doherty at The Town Hall Theatre, Galway on Thursday October 27, 8pm galwaycomedyfestival.com