Sunday HeraldDavid O’Doherty returns to Scotland this week for the first time since winning the if.comedy award at the Edinburgh Fringe. The 32-year-old, keyboard-toting comedian and children’s author can also be seen but not heard in his brother Mark’s forthcoming A Film With Me In It alongside Dylan Moran. He is currently compiling a collection of dubious facts about pandas.
What have you been up to since winning the award?
I’ve been encouraging people to make up facts in my Wikipedia entry.
You’re just back from performing in Canada. How was that?
I learned that if I’m a slightly unconventional stand-up here, in North America I’m like a Czech mime from the 1960s.
Tell me three panda facts.
In the black and white era, pandas were often given background roles in major motion pictures. There are 36 pandas in Casablanca. Unfortunately, the advent of colour signalled the end of this work. But with a keen eye, you can still spot six pandas in Gone with the Wind playing confederate soldiers. There’s one peeping out from under the stairs during the ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’ speech.
The average person encounters 0.3 pandas in their lifetime.
Owing to a bureaucratic mix up in registration by naturalist Dr Joseph Banks in 1831, the panda was classified not as a mammal but as a nut. This is why Adolf Hitler, who was vegetarian, would eat panda meat once a year on German Workers Day.
Your current show, Let’s Comedy, is partially about hype. Has winning the award changed you?
This is my Dive on the Grenade tour. Some people will come because of the hype and not everyone will like it. I was stared at in Sheffield. Hopefully though, those who like it will tell their friends. Fundamentally, nothing has changed. It’s not like I’ve started travelling around on a sequeway shouting at the homeless.
Have you cashed your giant winner’s cheque, as you tried to do when you won the So You Think You’re Funny competition in 1999?
Someone told me, probably Dylan Moran, that it was legal tender. So I took it to the bank and handed them their entertainment highlight of their year. I still maintain that cheque was cashable. But I don’t know how to find out for sure without looking a fool.
Will you be recording this show for release?
I’m going to record it in my sitting room with the dining room double doors open. I want to try and keep the laughter to a minimum. The problem with CDs and DVDs is that there are always loads of cutaways to audience cheering, which really isn’t necessary when you’re sitting listening at home.
You’re a self-described ‘flaneur’. Which is your favourite city to go ‘flaneuring’ in?
I like New York and Edinburgh. But Dublin is the best because all my friends are there. I’m not sure Dublin is such a great city but it’s impossible to distinguish it from the cronies I’ve hung out with since I was 15. And I do like to wander. I’m trying to bring ‘flaneuring’ back. I think that technically it’s to do with the Impressionists in Paris. But for me it implies having a cane and swinging it around your finger as you walk, Charlie Chaplin-style. No? Well, certainly a top hat.
In A Film With Me In It, did your brother not trust you to deliver any lines?
Well, the reason he cast me is because the character is his brother and called David. Though I’m not quadriplegic and don’t have a brain injury. It’s really Dylan and Mark’s film, they’re super-funny together. It doesn’t have that grim, Commitments-style view of Dublin from a million movies. As Mark said: ‘I wanted to write a Dublin film where at no point does a horse step out of a lift’.
Is there any sibling rivalry between you?
No, he’s a useful tool. Ha, ha, ha, he’s such a tool! I’m a terrible judge of whether things are funny. I’ll think something is hilarious as I’m falling asleep and then get up on stage the next night and say it to zero reaction whatsoever. And my brother is the one person who can tell me ‘this is funny, write more about this’, or ‘this is not funny, for God’s sake stop talking about it’. Because he did stand-up for a while he’s a good judge of funniness.
In one of your children’s stories, Shelly the lobster dies for the sake of music. What cause would you die for?
I suppose the inspiration for that was my dad quitting his bank job in 1968 to become a jazz musician. Shelly, likewise, makes the ultimate sacrifice for his art. In stand-up too, it’s all about sticking to your guns. I’ve had a few ludicrous TV offers but haven’t done them because I don’t think ultimately they’d make me happy. The Apprentice with Pets was one. With regard to actually dying for something, perhaps winning the Tour de France and then dying if I could make that deal with the devil.
Finally, is it true that you’re inspired by the speeches of Winston Churchill?
Churchill is a strange figure if you’re Irish because he was quite racist towards us. But listening to some of those two minute radio broadcasts from World War II are remarkably stirring. I think this goes back to when I toured with Tommy Tiernan. He was always into using theatricality in his stand-up and would listen to speeches. I find ‘Peace in our Time’ incredibly emotive. I recommend it when you’re hungover because there’s no better way to wake yourself up than wanting to beat up Nazis.
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