Comedian and regular of RTÉ's 'The Panel', Colin Murphy, spoke to RTÉ TEN's Taragh Loughrey-Grant about his comedy style, his new tour and Christmas plans.
We're here for The Bulmer's Comedy Festival which has moved from Dublin to set up it's new home in Clonmel, which you have hosted since it began in 2006. Did you think this was an unusual move?
Yeah, I think it’s rather strange although they do make Bulmers here. Its also brilliant that it’s in one venue, that’s the most fantastic thing about it and also the line-up is great because Fergal [O'Keeffe, the festival organiser] goes to Edinburgh and he finds everybody himself because he clearly loves his comedy and he’s got people that I’ve never heard of like Eric Lampaert, who I’d never seen before or heard of and he was great.
He’s a good eye for people and he has 'The Boy with Tape on his Face'. I’ve only seen snippets of him online but everyone who was in Edinburgh this year said he should have won awards left, right and centre and was robbed. That’s why it’s so good, he goes and finds these people, brings them to Ireland and it’s all on in one room.
A recent Guardian review of your show said: "He is distinguishably good. His delivery is immaculate...” When you’re working on TV shows like 'The Panel', how does your preparation and delivery vary from live stand-up and MCing?
When I MC I don’t think about it much, I just go on stage and do it.
The MC’s job is to go and break down that [putting on posh accent] ‘fourth wall between the stage and the audience', so I just go on stage and talk to people and improvise. I throw in a bit of material if it’s appropriate so that’s one way to do it.
When I do a show I know 80% of what I’m going to do and the other 20% is messing around with the audience.
Then when I do the panel as the MC, I’ve read the papers and that’s about it and the rest is sort of improvised.
Comedians are sometimes thought of as the class clown made good but more often than not they’re well-read, intelligent, quick thinkers and particularly in your style of observational comedy.
Most are yeah, even though they might not have been to university but they’re incredibly bright. I mean, you have to be smarter than your audience, that’s basically how it works; you have to be one step ahead.
You have to think about every single aspect of what you’re saying and it can be backed up with this, that or the other because otherwise people will say ‘Ah but you said earlier...’ So you’re constantly working ahead, you do read an awful lot and watch a lot of Discovery channel!
Do you find it easy as a comedian to promote yourself, to get your style across in interviews?
I don’t, I’m very bad at interviews, [laughing] I am. That’s the thing about being a comedian, people expect you to be 'on' all the time and you to perform and do jokes. And I don’t, I’m quite analytical and a lot of comedians are very analytical about why a joke works and why it doesn’t work, and why you should put what where, linking bits of material, it is very analytical.
Even the most scattergun comedians are incredibly analytical about why that works and why it doesn’t work. It’s the weirdest experience when you’re on stage and talking to yourself and you’re having complete conversations in your head, it's mental. It's like falling off a bicycle because if you think about it too much...you fall off. You’re constantly analysing: Why did this work? Why didn’t that work? Why’s he not laughing? That’s the main one for every comedian, you could have a room full of a thousand people and that’s the guy you’ll stare at the whole night and you’re not happy until you make him laugh.
Have you ever had to deal with a deadpan, nightmarish, non-responsive audience?
Oh God yeah, especially in Ireland. In small towns where everybody knows each other, the audience are incredibly reluctant to give you anything because if they give you anything, you’re going to pick up on it, that’s going to be their nickname and that’s all people are going to remember about them forever more, every time they walk into a pub, five years from now...’There’s John Joe, the man that rides sheep!’ You just have to work around it and go with it.
I’m touring around at the moment doing a full-length show, so you take snippets out of that. You always remember the new stuff, that’s the pain in the butt, that you always remember the new and can’t remember the old stuff, the stuff that you know is guaranteed to work and you’re saying ‘I know I did stuff five years ago that storms. But no, the new stuff, that you haven’t tried, that’s the stuff you want to do.
As a Dad of two boys, aged six and nine, how do you work touring around your Christmasplans?
I just take off, that’s it December, done and its all totally traditional, normal family, presents, Christmas tree, incredibly traditional and very old fashioned. I’ve always loved Christmas and it is that cliché that it is better when you have kids.
Colin Murphy is currently in the middle of his inaugural tour and you can book tickets on ticketmaster.co.uk
