The Comedy Store

A new genre of humour, more vivid, cynical and even cruel has been slouching onto the Irish stage. By Gene Kerrigan

Timing has a lot to do with whether stand up comedy is good - and tonight the timing is dreadful. Eight, they said, then half past, and nine is long gone and it's half past nine before Billy Magra goes on stage and starts with the humour. The reason for the bad timing was more bad timing - the show was set for Monday night, and that's when Not The Nine O'Clock News is on BBC 2. And a lot of the folks who might go to a gig like this are Not fans.

This show is in the Sportsman's Inn, in Mount Merrion and it's to launch a series of Friday night comedy sessions at the Sportsman's, a kind of pilot show.

Kevin McAleer is first on stage and he's wearing an acoustic guitar and there's one of those harmonica conntraptions around his neck and the first thing he does is take off the guitar and the contraption and mutter into the microphone, "That was my Bob Dylan imitation". His Presley imitation is even better. He lies on stage still as a corpse.

Jimmy O'Dea it isn't. Not that there was much wrong with Jimmy. But the advent of the harder genre of humour, more vivid, cynical and even cruel, which is common currency in most modern industrial nations, has been slow slouching onto the Irish stage, a butt dangling from its lip, a leer on its face. O'Dea reflected his age, a humour that reflects the counntry today is still trying to be born.

Kevin McAleer is from Omagh. "Of course, I knew a good bit about the South - from a Wolfe Tones LP I have at home."

It's McAleer's first time in front of a microphone - and it shows. Hands going up to his forehead, down beehind his back, apologetic, hesitant. His material is better than his deliivery, but he's just started delivering.

Billy Magra, who organised and is hosting the show, has been delivering since the early seventies in UCD stage antics. After a few years in the music business, managing and promoting, he moved into PR and although he's the most accomplished performer on stage tonight the comedy is so far a sideline. Last year he helped organise The Comedy Store, a weekly event where people turned up and tried their stuff on an audience that felt free to cheer or boo. The Friday nights at The Sportsman's are an attempt to deevelop that idea and to provide an outlet for this form of humour.

A young girl, Roisin Sheerin, recites poetry and it's teenage stuff but it's not hearts and flowers and has an edge and an irony. Two guys calling themmselves The Robots get up and they're dressed in black with white painted faces and all they're doing is dancing to Staying Alive arid doing it the way robots would and it should be boring and pointless - except that the guys are brilliant. Not a false move in a choreography that is extremely diffiicult to master, jerky movements and dead pan faces that would be eerie and disturbing if the audience wasn't held by the technical mastery.

An experimental gig like this has to have a dud and Gareth Kehoe obliges. He rambles on, apparently slowly building to something funny - but it's lead balloon time. Like a long, commplicated joke without a punch line. Kehoe is an actor and has lots of stage confidence, so much that you're sure he's going to top this off with a real zinger - but ... his act is an unfinishhed sentence.

When Billy Magra bounces back on stage he says wryly, "As you can see, Gareth Kehoe is a good actor."

In between the acts Billy (there must be some reason why he changed the spelling from McGrath but such intimate details should not be probed for fear of embarrassment) Magra acts as a cement that holds the show together. His humour mocks the esstablishment as it should (" ... when the Pope came to Ireland to promote his two live albums") but it also deals with the habits and pretensions of the young and the trendy - an area of life which involves a massive proportion of the population but which is seldom dealt with except in dismissive or patronising terms.

Parties. The four o'clockers, the guy crawling out from behind the sofa, hey. there's a guitar, man ("You have to put man after everything, like a stamp of approval") the women in their long dresses sitting in the middle of the floor with their ankles crossed, clutching their anti-nuclear stickers ("My one great fear is that some day I'm going to see a black Morris Minor without an anti-nuke sticker") and they're listening to the guy with the guitar and it's always American Pie, or Sloop John B. or You've Got A Friend. And there's always some spaced out character rambling round asking people, "Have you got a bottle openner, man? Hey man, have you got a bottle opener?" And when he finds one he keeps wandering around €"Hey man, have you got a bottle?"

And the Leeson Street discos with the Accentometer on the door which instantly computes your annual inncome ("If you don't wear a tie you're a psychopath") and the showband dances of old ("Who's playing - Bar Extension? Terrific, they are!")

The show closer is actor Mannix Flynn, who makes good use of his hard man image. He tries out the microphone, asks if it's working 0"Can you get the Dublin accent right? Good, there's a lot of people in the Abbey can't". Bewley's, hippies and the Sunday Tribune colour magazine get the treatment. Flynn plays Mise Eire on the spoons, stands on chairs and tables and ends up by begging the audience's pardon while he consults his script. Flicks through several pages of handwritten notes, says, "No, I think that's about it."

Twink was in the audience, and the king of the Sunday morning stag shows, Sil Fox, and Mike Murphy was somewhere at the back. Afterwards The Robots got the offer of a spot on The Live Mike.

Nobody told any jokes. The style is just to talk about what's going on and to be funny about it without settting up stories with punch lines. 'Some of the acts will pop up now and then on Friday nights at the Sportsman's, some new people will be along. Some of them will be bad, some tolerable, some very, very good. •