BOOK OF THE DAY: Tickling the English: A Portrait of a People by an Irishman with Baggage, by Dara O Briain Michael, Joseph 308pp, £12.99
DARA O Briain’s first book is part travelogue, part social commentary, part tour diary. Some sections are on the dull side and others sputter into fitful life, but the best are the finest comic champagne, bubbling with the cleverness and insight we have come to expect from this superb performer, currently Britain’s most successful Irish comedian.
If Tickling the Englishdoesn't entirely impress, there are still many oases of funniness. It works best when O Briain ruminates on English oddness, gloom and self-deprecation: "England is the only country in the world that would welcome the news of the longest life expectancy in human history with the headline 'Pensions Timebomb!' "
It’s a typical comment: gentle and teasing with a glint of steel behind the smile. This Wicklow- born son of a trade-union employee, educated in a Gaelscoil before studying maths and theoretical physics at UCD, has lived in London for several years, where he and his surgeon wife have a small child.
The book comes to life in the chapter that is an elaboration of a routine he calls “I Will Always Love My English Child”.
There are heartfelt observations here to strike a chord somewhere in the family of almost every Irish reader.
“I am Irish, my children will not be,” he writes. “That was my country, they are from somewhere else. They won’t be raised ‘Irish’, in a ludicrous, artificial holding pattern, until they get the chance to go ‘home’. They are home. I hope they’ll be interested in my heritage, but I won’t be demanding that they go to Irish-dancing lessons. I hope they won’t go to Morris-dancing lessons, but at least it’s their own.”
If that sounds ingratiating, be aware that when O Briain did the routine in Dublin he told his ironically booing audiences he would love his English child even if he scored the winning goal for England against Ireland. At Croke Park.
As far as the diary is concerned, well, I suppose you had to be there, really. O Briain has performance set pieces, naturally, but these are often abandoned if his interplay with the audience proves more fruitful.
The act changes and grows as the tour trundles on: improvised exchanges from show one are recalled and analysed in show two and so forth. It succeeds because few comedians are as quick- witted or empathetic.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t translate into print too well. O Briain’s comeback to a heckle from an IT trainer may have had the audience in stitches in Norwich, but lies gasping for air on the page. And the endless trotting-out of brilliant ripostes does seem rather self- congratulatory.
I had problems with the travelogue element, too. For a start, O Briain is too well known through his television show Mock the Weekto tackle it properly.
The average jobbing club comic, gigging around Britain on public transport, meeting the public more or less anonymously, chatting to other comedians over a drink, absorbs plenty that can be turned into material.
O Briain has only the company of his driver as he is brought from city to city to do his solo show, often arriving when the towns have more or less closed down for the night. His interaction with the public is mainly conducted within the artificiality of a theatrical environment and the travelogue sections smack a little of guidebook guff shoehorned into the narrative.
That said, the best bits of Tickling the Englishare good enough to be going on with while we wait for the outstanding book O Briain will surely one day write.
Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist