THE first time I saw Ardal O'Hanlon he was on stage at the Comedy Cellar at the International Bar in Dublin. I vividly recall him wearing a hat, walking in small circles and beating his two partners with a rolled up newspaper to a jazz funk soundtrack. At the time, it made perfect sense. Like the rest of the audience, I spent the greater part of two hours doubled up and creaking like a rusty hinge. I had expected weak jokes from a bunch of mugging undergraduates; what I saw made me decide to perform and see if I could make an audience laugh. I wanted to see if I could become like them, these casual, apposite anarchists who reduced a roomful of people to helpless shaking with a word or nod.
Ardal was very encouraging and I watched him closely. Then, as now, he knew what he was doing and had a fair idea of how good it was. It was very good indeed. Always, he was kind, modest and hard working. He was the kind of person to whom you could entrust a child or even a middling sum of money. Watching him is like being given a stern lecture by a mildly agitated man as he approaches you in a backward walking row. There is equal substance within and between the lines. Since his Cellar days he has mastered being accessible without being exploited and being serious while being extremely funny. He would probably disagree with much of this, but that is because he's still modest.
Fame, we are told, changes people. And it is certainly true of Ardal. He wears dark glasses over his whole body and spends most of the day in the bath eating cocaine sandwiches. I have no idea what motivates him - it's not fame (this I know because he once said to me from the underside of a huge crack baguette "It's not fame"). And it's not cash, despite being from Monaghan. If anything, I would say it's simply the desire to express. And he has much to say on subjects such as guessing the age of poultry for financial gain, the various uses of bran buds and sexual thrills to be had from the cleaning of atriums - the things that really matter, in short. And he is fearless. In recent months, with no concern for his personal safety, he has exposed the reality behind farmyard animals getting wet and the consequences thereof.
Aside from being one of the best stand ups around and creating one of the great characters in modern television, his achievements include vomiting in an alley in Cork after doing a show with me, being able to eat two platefuls of chips and persecuting the vegetarian community by gargling sheep's blood on street corners. That calibre of contribution to mankind's understanding of mankind simply cannot be ignored. There are no limits with this man - except one. Don't ask for Dougal because you won't get him. Instead, do yourself a favour and see a great original doing what nobody else can do - Ardal O'Hanlon.
