Sunday’s offering was a St Patrick’s Day Special, promising sets from three Irish comedians. We settled in, opting for seats at the side of the room at a distance just clear of the comedians’ field of view, and my companion for the evening had truly got into the spirit of things by purchasing a pint of Guinness, when our MC for the evening arrived on stage. Conor Drum welcomed us enthusiastically with typical call and response pleasantries; “Are you having a good night?” Ruuayyy! “Have you all got a drink?” Ruuayyy! “Are there any Irish in tonight?” Rather troublingly, there were only sporadic woops. “Are you all having a good St Paddy’s Day?” … And this was the turning point. The unconvincing and lethargic response to this inquiry, from an audience of only about 100 people on a filthy wet Sunday night, must have prompted quizzical and disconcerted looks amongst the acts in the green room backstage. You can just picture the call from the booking agent now; “It’s an all Irish line up… Manchester has a vibrant and proud Irish community… Yeah they even have a parade… It’ll be packed with people who are up for the craic… You can’t fail!”. It came as a surprise to me as an audience member, but it was palpable. We weren’t Irish, we weren’t drunk and we weren’t really having a good St Paddy’s.
Faced with this stark reality Conor Drum, had some serious work to do to warm up the crowd and frankly he floundered. “What job do you do?”… “Electrician.” Was one of many responses to this question, and Drum appeared to have nothing on this. It was hardly an obscure profession. Having struggled to warm up the crowd, which was understandable given the reasons mentioned already, Drum introduced the first act, Andrew Ryan.
Andrew Ryan arrived confidently on stage and having sensed that the crowd was still cold, proceeded to perform his own warm up routine. Ryan is a decent club comedian with an anecdotal style, in keeping with traditional Irish comedians and he warmly worked through clichés about catholic families with some good material, but just as he was hitting his stride he was derailed by a heckler. Hecklers are evidence both for and against Darwinism; reminding us that we’ve only just evolved from primitive Neanderthals, whilst their mindless grunting simultaneously proves that evolution might not actually have happened at all. Having found his rhythm, as well as a hard-earned rapport with the audience, Ryan was thrown completely when the heckler managed to holler his monosyllabic input just at the point of a punchline. He never recovered his routine, but won us back over with some self-deprecating pleas for this particularly difficult crowd not to buy tickets for his upcoming tour. I feel that Andrew Ryan wasn’t given the best opportunity to demonstrate how good he really is.
After Conor Drum faired much better with some material about snoring, he introduced Peter Flanagan, who had good material about interactions with people from different nationalities. He was given a fair chance (evidently the Frog and Bucket’s bouncer had manfully cautioned our would-be ‘Comedy Newcomer of the Year’ in our midst) and had some well written material. He was informed, prepared and funny, although his affectation of self-confident posturing really slowed his pace, so much so that we were ahead of many of his punchlines, sometimes even two or thee lines ahead. This was odd, because they were funny and well written, but he lacked the pace to beat us to the outcome, so he undid some of his good work.
The headline act for the evening was Rory O’Hanlon, who injected pace into the proceedings and had a good delivery. He worked through the comedy club tropes as though he had studied the manual. “Is this your girlfriend?”, “What job do you do?”, “Where are you from?” etc. He hit some marks with regional stereotypes and injected it with some very good material from his own experiences. O’Hanlon was certainly the highlight of the evening, with his experience showing and his charisma instilling confidence in him and he extracted his biggest laughs from his self-deprecating material about his own ‘Irishness’. He also worked at a much greater pace so even if some of his jokes weren’t so great, they didn’t have time to linger before he was hitting us with more gags and inevitably many of them were winners.
Overall we saw three good acts, but for reasons that are hard to explain, they struggled to get the audience on-side for quite some time. The names on the bill are worth watching and given more room to develop their material, and indeed a more receptive audience to deliver it to, they’ll demonstrate what funny comedians they really are.
Reviewer - Ben Hassouna-Smith
on - 17/3/19
No comments:
Post a Comment