An Irishman's Diary

IT USED TO BE SAID that stand-up comedy was “the new rock and roll”. More recently, the same claim has been made for economics. And I’m not sure if either discipline lives up to the description. But having seen David McWilliams’s one-man show in the Peacock earlier this week, I believe that economics may be the new stand-up comedy.

Not that his performance was especially comedic. Maybe the biggest laugh of the evening was when a famous photograph of Bertie Ahern ankle-deep in the rising flood waters of Drumcondra – a picture that now looks prophetic as well as funny – flashed up behind him. But it was a very entertaining night nonetheless.

And the fact that even a small theatre could be filled for what it is essentially an economics lecture shows just how much the dismal science – normally condemned to the margins of society, which in a happier world would be where it belongs – has come to dominate our lives.

The point is underlined by the continuing tragicomedy of Fine Gael, in which the unprecedented pre-eminence of economists is a recurring theme. I’d be surprised if somebody somewhere is not already working on a stage version of that party’s doomed search for a number-crunching messiah: first George Lee, then Richard Bruton.

But it may be too early yet. One senses there will be a third act – if not a fourth and fifth – before Fine Gael achieves full dramatic resolution. At the moment, its plight seems a little too derivative of Waiting for Godot: a play in which, famously, nothing happens twice.

Getting back to stand-ups, however, I suspect McWilliams has tapped into a latent public hunger for economic theatre, in which performers make entertaining sense of our national crisis, if only for an hour or two. This being so, we can expect a rash of similar shows in the months ahead, starring economists already well known to us from radio and TV.

With a good director and sympathetic lighting, for example,“An Evening with Moore McDowell” could yet be the surprise hit of this year’s Dublin Fringe. Elsewhere, Morgan Kelly might present a Dave Allen-type act: sitting on a stool and interspersing mordantly witty observations with pre-filmed sketches. And perhaps Constantin Gurdgiev could present a Russian-themed evening, leavening theories about how to achieve renewed growth with readings from Dostoevsky and Turgenev.

But the beauty of economics is that, these days, everyone has an opinion. So, as with stand-up comedy, there is probably now also an outlet for economist-improv clubs, where taxi drivers, people you meet at bus stops, and other amateur commentators, could try their views on a wider audience. After all, even with serious economic theory, you don’t want to overdo the statistics and graphs. Identifying home truths is the real talent and that’s what people want to hear.

Take a key theme in McWilliams’s show: the traditional (but unjustified, as he sees it) Irish fear of losing face in the eyes of the world. This, he claims, is why we are always so reluctant to devalue our currency, or default on debt, or let Anglo-Irish Bank collapse, etc: even when the money markets fully expect us to do these things and would quickly forget it if we did.

His homespun metaphor for this obsession with preserving appearances is "the good room" kept by his grandmother and others of her generation, strictly for the approval of visitors, not for living in. And he may well be right that it is from there that the attitude derives. It might explain why we were all so delighted recently when the Wall Street Journalremarked on how clean and well kept our sitting room was.

But while we’re at it, my own theory for our pay-at-all-costs mentality is that public houses, rather than private ones, may be the big influence. I refer in particular to the pernicious round system. This is less pervasive than it once was (as indeed are pubs themselves). Yet we all know that failing to “put your hand in your pocket” is still a major faux pas in Irish life: to commit which is to invite a life-long reputation for meanness, and sometimes even a nickname.

Thus we always stand our round, even if we’ve been drinking humble pints all evening while one of our companions has been on double vodkas, and his girlfriend is knocking back sex-on-the-beach cocktails, complete with miniature umbrellas (Anglo-Irish Bank in a nutshell) at €9.50 a pop. Americans will never understand this attitude, never mind Greeks. The money markets would be completely mystified. But that’s the Irish way.

THERE WAS an unintentionally humorous moment at the Peacock show when the usual warning to switch off mobiles phones was reinforced early on by an anecdote from the performer himself. McWilliams described attending a meeting of bankers some time ago and feeling inadequate because of the eloquence of another speaker’s argument. That was until the same speaker’s phone went off, with a ridiculous ring-tone, fatally undermining his performance.

Continuing the show, McWilliams soon afterwards introduced a graphic of Ireland’s “debt-clock”: the figure on it climbing before our eyes. Simultaneously, a small but high-pitched beeping noise started up in the auditorium. Where I was sitting, everyone assumed it to be a phone. Muscles tensed automatically. “It’s somebody’s alarm,” the woman beside me muttered. Then we realised it was a sound effect accompanying the debt clock – which was now at €84 billion and still mounting. So we all relaxed again; although God knows why.