as Punch magazine cartoon images: the potato-eating famine refugee, the drunk navvy or the balaclava-clad terrorist. As recently as the 1980s and maybe the early 90s these were the stereotypes propagated, particularly in right-wing elements of the media. Every Irish comedian who came over to Britain from 1967 to 1997 had to drop in a few gags about terrorism just to get it out of the way because otherwise it was the elephant in the room. But the peace process changed everything, virtually overnight. It changed the acceptability of being Irish in Britain, it changed the nature of comedy and it changed the portrayal of Ireland in the media. Neil Jordan’s 1992 (pre-peace-process) film The Crying Game was revolutionary enough for showing an IRA man falling in love with what he thought was the girlfriend of a British soldier. But now in 2013 we see Gillian Anderson in The Fall, which is about a psychopath running around Belfast killing women and there’s not an ArmaLite or a terrorist cell in sight. It’s a huge cultural, political, historical shift in the right direction.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, comedians had torn up their jokes about terrorists, drunken builders and women with twenty-five children. All that is a clichéd bore. We don’t laugh at Irishness any more; we laugh at what’s genuinely funny – and that’s what’s made it possible for us to enjoy the ironic post-peace-process sitcom Father Ted. Maybe in the past we would have been a bit more sensitive about the three priests banished to Craggy Island for their misdemeanours but now it’s just pure comedy and we’re all laughing together.
It’s not that the Irish are po-faced when it comes to humour. On the contrary, we use it to end an argument, to alleviate sadness or to poke fun at ourselves, but all self-references must be on our terms. And if there’s one thing that’s always been fertile territory for Irish humour, it’s having a dig at authority. As a people we’re instinctively, unfailingly anti-authoritarian, probably because of all those centuries of resisting British authority. It’s bred into us from an early age; it’s in the water. The first comedian I’m going to talk about in this chapter is the one who first made his name for attacking the biggest authority of the twentieth century: our very own Catholic Church (those of a sensitive disposition may want to make the sign of the cross before reading on).
DAVE ALLEN: the funniest man in the pub
6 July 1936–10 March 2005
I’m bothered by power. People, whoever they might be, whether it’s the government, or the policeman in the uniform, or the man on the door – they still irk me a bit. From school, from the first nun that belted me …
I remember as a young boy, pyjamas on, sitting on the couch beside my dad and watching him as he chuckled while watching a man on the television. The man was roughly my dad’s age (ancient) and appeared to be drinking a whiskey with one hand, occasionally smoking and repeatedly removing non-existent lint from his trousers. It was Catholic Ireland so when this mild-mannered man dressed up as a bishop and started doing fart jokes, I realized we were witnessing a bold man – a very funny, bold man.
The comedy that struck a chord in our house when I was growing up ranged from The Muppet Show through to Tommy Cooper via Dermot Morgan and Basil Fawlty and on to Dave Allen. As a family, we appeared to enjoy anarchic yet droll humour that was rarely vulgar but always clever with a twist of mischief. Dave Allen embodied all of these traits. It was dad humour. Everyone’s dad loved him. He was that intriguing paradox of being gentle but cutting, intelligent but accessible. You didn’t need a degree to get his jokes – just an ability to share his observations.
Allen was born in Dublin and his dad, Cullen, was a journalist and celebrated raconteur who often shared a bar counter with Irish novelist and wit Brian O’Nolan (aka Flann O’Brien aka Myles na gCopaleen). His mum, Jean, was a nurse who happened to be born in England. With a story-telling father and an English mother, it’s perhaps no wonder Dave Allen ended up sitting on a stool on British TV telling funny stories for a living.
His Irish background would very much inform his future career and the substance of his routines, so many of which revolved around the Catholic Church and a questioning irreverence towards that institution and all who sailed in her. He was a pupil at Beaumont convent school, which was run by nuns whom he described as ‘the Gestapo in drag’. Unhappy as he might have been at the time, these nuns would go on to inform much of Allen’s later comedy: ‘I arrived at this convent, with these Loreto nuns, and the first thing that was said to me was: “You’ll be a good boy, won’t you?” And I went: “What?” So they said: “When you come in here, you’ll be a good boy, because bold and bad and naughty boys are punished!” And I’d never seen a crucifix before. All I could see was this fella nailed to a cross! I thought: “Shit! I will be good!”’
He went on to Terenure College in Dublin, another Catholic school which, he recalled, combined cruel corporate punishment with ominous talk of sex and its association with the Devil himself. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Allen was expelled and left school altogether at the age of sixteen. A few journalistic jobs followed (clerk at the Irish Independent, writer with the Drogheda Argus) before he decided to try his luck in London, having run out of options at home. His attempts to get a job on Fleet Street came to nothing but he was more successful at Butlin’s, where he got his first taste of audience approval as a Redcoat. Sitting telling jokes and stories between the evening’s acts suited him right down to the ground and he decided to focus on comedy full-time. First he changed his name from the alien linguistic mouthful David Edward Tynan O’Mahony to the less complicated Dave Allen (a stage name that cannily secured alphabetical top-billing). He was still Irish – just not quite so much.
It was the early days of television and Allen seized the opportunity when he appeared on the BBC talent show New Faces. He toured with the singer Helen Shapiro and by 1963, he was joined in the support-act dressing room by up an unstoppable force of nature called The Beatles. It was in Australia where he got his biggest break when he hosted Tonight with Dave Allen – a show that ran for eighty-four episodes. (In an odd romantic twist I can’t resist mentioning, Allen was linked to the feline singer Eartha Kitt who appeared on the weekly show twice. The pair were seen holding hands in public but nothing was to come of it and the story died. Shame, really.)
Back in the UK in 1964, with an Australian wife in tow instead of an American sex kitten, Allen built up a reputation as host of Sunday Night at the Palladium and as resident comedian on a show hosted by another Irishman abroad, Val Doonican (see Chapter 8). By 1967, he was established enough to go it alone when he started hosting Tonight with Dave Allen on ITV and it was here that the character we all came to know and admire emerged with barstool, half-smoked cigarette and a glass of what we all presumed was whiskey. The drinking and smoking put you at your ease. You felt you could sit there and have a dialogue with him. He’s like the funniest man in the pub. Now, of course, the funniest man in the pub can sometimes be the funniest man in the pub and he can sometimes be the pub bore, but Allen really was the funniest man in the pub and you wanted to sit there and listen to his stories all night, perhaps with a glass of your own in hand.
A mixture of monologues and sketches made the BBC take notice and it was on this channel that The Dave Allen Show and Dave Allen at Large dominated the comic airwaves between 1968 and 1979. Allen’s experience of a Catholic education and life in a near-theocratic society informed his material, and sex and the demonization of it by the Church loomed large too. The confession box was a regular target. Allen described it as akin to ‘talking to God’s middle-man, a ninety-five-year-old bigot’. Back home in Ireland, though, few in authority saw the funny side of Dave Allen’s jokes and in 1977 his shows were banned on RTÉ. The Church was still a very big noise at the time, and perhaps viewers were writing in saying ‘Get this filth off the air!’ But it did him no harm to be banned in his home country; it all helped to build the anti-authoritarian image we know and love.
