Since getting his big break on RTÉ's 'Nighthawks', comedian Kevin McAleer has been 'putting the dead into deadpan' for 25 years now - with sublime wit, playing the fool. And he still loves it, writes Susan McKay
IT SEEMS LIKE Kevin McAleer's children have inherited his startlingly funny way with words. "We had a gerbil here that died," he says, "and we cremated it. Louis told his teacher we crucified it." One of them told someone that the family didn't eat meat, "because we're comedians". He chortles. It pleased him that his children, Florence (18) and twins Louis and Josiah (17), came to his show, Chalk and Cheese, when he performed it in Omagh recently, and brought their friends. "It's nice that young people enjoy it," he says.
Nice when his hard-core fans go back nearly a quarter of a century, to the night he staggered onto the stage at the Holyrood Hotel in Dublin's Harcourt Street to do the audience spot. "RTÉ would have you believe it all started in the International Bar, but us old-timers know this isn't true. That was 10 years later." He didn't have a lot of material that night. "Just quite a few pints of Guinness. I concentrated on getting up there. I'd stumbled across the comedy scene in San Francisco in about 1981. Something about it made me feel I could do it, but I couldn't pick up the courage. I came back to Dublin kicking myself. I'd missed my chance in San Francisco - now it was in front of me again."
He "messed about, got a couple of laughs, and got hooked" that night in the Holyrood. He also got encouragement from Glasgow comedian Oscar McLennon, who told him he had the makings of something and he should work on it. McAleer proceeded to do that. "I was hardly able to sleep - a mixture of horror and exhilaration." He moved to London, and went on the circuit. One of his biggest supporters has been the British comedian Stewart Lee.
We meet at his home, an old bungalow in the beautiful badlands behind Omagh. Drumnakilly. He asks - deceptively casual - if I'd like a cup of coffee. "Yes," I say. "I'd love one." He proceeds towards a gleaming machine in the corner of the kitchen. "Val gave it to me for my birthday," he says, shouting out apologies through bouts of loud grinding and whooshing. Val is his wife, the artist Valerie Whitworth. It takes a long time, but a perfect cappuccino is duly presented. He watches as I drink it. Writing comedy, it emerges, is not unlike making coffee. "It comes from the back of my head," he says. "It can take 20 years for something to filter through."
This is the house McAleer grew up in, "the home place". He left in 1974, and came back with his family in 1997, two years after his father died. "We were living in a council flat in London," he says. "It just suddenly dawned on us that it would be a great move. I felt that 'sea change' Seamus Heaney wrote about had occurred - otherwise I wouldn't have dreamt of bringing my kids back to a place I couldn't wait to be out of." They came back in a summer heatwave, he recalls, and it was idyllic, with the bog to the front and the Sperrins behind. They love it.
There's a hand-painted sign on the road at Aughnacloy that says, "Remember the Drumnakilly Martyrs", but he doesn't, as they say, pass much remark about that sort of thing. (They were three IRA men shot dead by the SAS in 1988). "I actively avoid it," he says. "If it comes on the news, I change the station." He didn't even know that his family had lived in the house at Drumnakilly for several generations until Val asked his father about it. "There was a kind of taboo about asking those kind of questions," he says, puzzled himself.
After the ceasefires, though, he did a show full of Troubles humour. He raised the roof at the West Belfast festival with it, though the folk of those parts are not known for a willingness to laugh at their acute sense of victimhood: "I was born in Tyrone in 1956 for something I didn't do. I was innocent but they gave me life. I still remember the midwife who extradited me . . ." He urged Protestants to study Irish history: "Anyone who enjoyed the hunger strikes would love the Famine . . . "
He's also compared the Christian Brothers and the British army - both ask you about Irish history and beat you up if you give the wrong answers. In Chalk and Cheese, his character tells a truly shocking joke about his Granny's superstitions. "She always said: 'If a man in a balaclava comes to your door, there's going to be a death in the family'." Black as the blackest of Northern humour. "You tread a fine line," McAleer says. "That one always falls on the right side of a laugh."
When first he left Drumnakilly it was to go to Dublin, where he studied "journalism, would you believe". He quickly realised it wasn't for him. "Meeting people you didn't know and asking them questions put a great strain on me," he says. "But the writing aspect interested me. I used to study The Irish Timesto see how sentences were composed." After "crawling over the finishing line" of the course, he shot to the top of the ladder of a commercial transport magazine. "I was editor in six months," he says. "I don't like to boast."
Within a year, he'd dropped out and gone to London. People did that in those days. "You lived in squats and signed on the dole and did a bit of travelling," he says. "There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. Barcelona, Amsterdam, San Francisco." There was a brief foray back to college in Dublin, allegedly to study philosophy, actually to obtain the legendary "Northern grant". He toured with his slide show, a series of zany images which he found on this travels and to which he attached an absurd commentary. "The more irrelevant the better," he says. The show had a particular appeal for members of the audience who were stoned.
He met Val, who's from Suffolk, when she came to see the show in 1984, and by her own account, fell in love with it, and with its presenter. It was she who found the picture of the four owls staring out, which became McAleer's signature.
Towards the end of the 1980s, it was Anne Enright who gave McAleer his big break in Ireland. She saw him perform at the Project and invited him to do a slot on the soon to be legendary Nighthawks, which she was then producing on RTÉ. McAleer became a cult figure, with his surreal rustic tales told in the slow Tyrone drawl. One critic said of him that he "put the dead back into deadpan". Some viewers complained: "They thought I was just an innocent and the people in Donnybrook were just taking a hand out of me," he says. "They thought it was unfair."
Success bewildered him. "Shows were selling out weeks in advance. There were queues down streets. I was asking for what I considered a lot of money and they weren't batting an eyelid. I couldn't believe they were swallowing this, and they couldn't believe I was so naive," he says.
Chalk and Cheesecame about after a long percolation. "A long time ago, I read Gogol's Diary of A Madman," he says. The show is unsettling but you succumb to it because it is also hilariously funny. The man on stage believes that "they are onto me" and sees the evidence everywhere - the plan on the wall of his hotel room with his room circled in red, the street map with "you are here" pointed out on it. "How do they know?" But he outfoxes them. Burns his house down to foil the postman. (Working for the government, you know.) He is outraged by the implied insult on the bottle of bleach: "Keep away from children".
McAleer says he read up on schizophrenia and other conditions, but this character is actually unsettlingly familiar. Literal minded. Paranoid. Believing himself wily, one step ahead of his myriad enemies. In short, a typical Northerner. His neighbour lies, he says. Has a sticker in his car that says, "my other car's a Porsche". But he doesn't, in fact, have another car, so our man burns this one. "Oh, he came crying to me," he says, with malign satisfaction. "'They burnt my car', he says. 'Oh', says I, 'well you may just use your other one'."
It comes as a surprise to learn that he is writing a novel now, and that it isn't funny. "No. It's serious," he says. "It's about JFK's assassination." He's been over to Dallas "mooching about" the scene of the crime. He won't say any more than that 150,000 words have already been written. Meanwhile, life proceeds at a tranquill pace in Drumnakilly. The house is full of flowers from Val's 50th birthday party. They went to the Organic Centre in Leitrim for the day, McAleer says. "Not quite the garden centre, but dangerously close."