Tall Tales

FUNNY GUY: Conal Creedon brought the house down at the Flat Lake festival with a story about a public reading he did in Kerry – the only problem is he made the whole thing up. He explains himself to EOIN BUTLER

FOR AN AUTHOR, there can be no conceivable indignity more humiliating than a public reading at which no one turns up. But novelist and playwright Conal Creedon has different ideas. At the Flat Lake Festival this month, he regaled the audience with a hilarious, unscripted account of a reading he gave in Blarney public library, with just one member of the public in attendance.

The gentleman was elderly and hard of hearing. Worse, he constantly interrupted with questions, even going so far as to quibble with details of the narrative. Creedon’s anecdote brought the house down at Flat Lake, but he declines to repeat it in print. In fact, he has a confession to make. He couldn’t repeat it even if he wanted to: because he made the whole thing up. “It’s mad,” he admits. “I get into this mode when I’m standing in front of people, where I think, God, I’d better belt something out quick or they might all start to leave.”

So he improvised this extraordinary story on the spot? “Yeah, I think the inspiration came from standing in front of all those people and thinking, well, thank God they’re here. Because imagine how awful it would be if nobody turned up? Then I thought, wouldn’t it be worse still if just one person turned up? It was an extraction of that.”

If Creedon’s gentle, down-to-earth style invites comparisons to the work of Garrison Keillor, then Cork city is his Lake Wobegon. Born the 11th of 12 children (the broadcaster John is his older brother), Creedon still lives next door to the house he grew up in as a boy. A deep love for the city and its people infuses his work. “It’s a big town rather than a small city,” he says. “Roddy Doyle writes about his part of the world. Pat McCabe does the same. So I write about Cork. It’s what fires me up.” He identifies so strongly with his home place that when he was commissioned to write a radio drama for the BBC in 2005, he used his street address as the title.

This caused some unforeseen complications. “There was fierce confusion when it came to my fee,” he laughs. “They said, ‘What’s the address?’ I said, ‘No 1, Devonshire Street.’ They said, ‘We know that. But what’s your address?’ ”

Despite this intensely local outlook, his stories and plays have travelled well. “The stuff I do is very colloquial,” he admits. “So when my plays were showing in New York, it did cross our minds that we should slow it down, that we should change some of the references. But we didn’t and we got a great reception.”

In fact, his plays have resonated with audiences farther afield than that. “I brought three shows to Shanghai last year. One was about a character who walks around with his eyes closed. He smells his way around the place. It was very much about Cork city. But they got it.”

Given his talent for making people laugh, has he ever considered an alternative career in comedy? “I did a reading tour of the US a few years ago. It was eight dates, east coast to west coast. As I was going along, I think people were writing on blogs about me.

“When I arrived in San Francisco, the man who picked me up at the airport said, ‘So you’re the funny guy I’ve been hearing so much about?’ When I got to the venue, the first thing I noticed was that they had a spotlight out for me. They thought I was a stand-up comedian. I said ‘No, are you mad? I can’t go on as a comedian.”

Be that as it may, any comics would envy the laughs he elicited from the Butty Barn audience. And if you missed that performance, well, who knows? He might appear at a public library near you.

Conalcreedon.com