Kevin McAleer, who first came to fame as a hilariously rambling surrealist on RTÉ’s Nighthawks in the 1980s and most recently played the hilariously surreal rambler Uncle Colm on Channel 4′s Derry Girls, has come from Omagh to Dublin with his relatively new bus pass. “It makes the bus a bit more fun,” he tells me as we sit in the Irish Film Institute, drinking sparkling water.
He has a new show called Why Am I Here? that collects many of his “greatest hits” and is named after a routine he has about being a philosophical teenager. “I was looking up and asking, ‘Who am I?’ ‘Why am I here?’ And then this British army patrol came around the corner ... and the British soldiers were asking me the same questions.”
The history of Irish alternative comedy usually begins with the Comedy Cellar in Dublin in the late 1980s, but everyone acknowledges that McAleer was there first. How you encounter comedy when you’re from a small farm in Drumnakilly near Omagh is another question. “I would have been the natural person to be helping my dad but he had to drag me out of the house, away from the radio ... We didn’t have a TV until the early ‘70s. We didn’t have electricity for that matter. Monty Python would have been a major innovation. I remember hearing Ivor Cutler on the John Peel show ... Bits of Spike Milligan. Definitely the language was a big attraction, especially with Ivor Cutler.”
This new phenomenon of a comedy club had started [in] the Holyrood Hotel on Harcourt Street. I’m going back to the real roots now, not these Johnny-come-latelies in their Comedy Cellar. I could bore you for an hour
Was McAleer funny as a kid? “There was another guy in the class who was actually a Protestant guy who ended up in our school,” he says. “It was like a Derry Girls situation. He was the ‘wee Protestant fellow’. He got thrown out of the Academy [the Protestant school]. It was never talked about.” He laughs. “Me and him used to exchange these surreal bits of stream-of-consciousness stuff and I remember the English teacher, a very straight-talking Christian Brother, but not one of the psychopaths, he picked up one of these and he looked at it and went ... ” He mimes looking at a sheet of invisible paper officiously, then says: “ ‘Hmmm.’ That was my first review.”
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At 18 he went to Dublin to study journalism but “didn’t really get far”. He first saw stand-up comedy in San Francisco in 1981. “I would go along to these clubs thinking, ‘Ah, I’ll get up when I have enough drink in me’, but it didn’t matter how much I drank, I still didn’t manage to do it. When I went back to Dublin I was kicking myself. But this new phenomenon of a comedy club had started [in] the Holyrood Hotel on Harcourt Street. I’m going back to the real roots now, not these Johnny-come-latelies in their Comedy Cellar. I could bore you for an hour.”
In the hotel they had an audience slot, and one night he took the stage. “I had no idea what I was going to say and I can’t remember what I did say, but I got a couple of laughs ... A guy came up to me, Oscar McLennan, who’s still a very good friend of mine, one of the people who’d come from the London circuit. He said, ‘You’ve got something there. You should work on that’, and I took him at his word and came back with maybe 15 minutes of material the next week. I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. My head was just buzzing.”
Through the 1980s he moved between Dublin and London with detours to other European cities. He found a discarded box of slides and made an absurdist slide show the centre of his act. It started with a particularly hilarious picture of four owls that his girlfriend Valerie Whitworth, now his wife, bought him for his birthday in 1984. After some silence he began with: “You take four normal people, invite them into your home ... ”
He loved London’s “accessible and human” alternative comedy scene. “It was very eclectic. Half of them would be called performance artists now. There were vaudeville element. A slide show didn’t seem out of place.” He mentions some of the people he shared a stage with: Arnold Brown, the late Jeremy Hardy, Stewart Lee “when he was just a young, up-and-coming lad”.
I remember after Bloody Sunday we went into school. This very articulate French teacher made this very short, very emotional speech and we were told to go home and mourn. I remember the mixture of elation because it’s Monday morning and you’re told you’re going to be sent home again, but ...
Another friend, Californian comedian Kit Hollerbach, suggested he bring his slide show to San Francisco, the site of his first exposure to stand-up. He laughs. “It didn’t work at all. I was just too avant-garde for them. I didn’t go on and say ‘Hey, how y’all doing? Give a big hand to the compère.’ I just went up, switched on the projector and then didn’t say anything for a good few minutes. They’re all frantically looking at their watches like time is money, even at a comedy show. And then when I eventually said, ‘You take four normal people’ they’re like [he adopts an American accent], ‘They’re not people! What the fuck? Get this guy out of here.’ ” He laughs. “That was funny to me. I didn’t go there to make my fortune. I went there because Kit Hollerbach told me to. Back in London she said, ‘How did it go?’ and I said ‘Terrible’ and she said ‘What?’ Maybe the ones who get me leave California.”
His material worked much better in London and Dublin. Then RTÉ producer and now Booker Prize-winning novelist Anne Enright saw him perform and was convinced to put him on late-night show Nighthawks. He rambled into a video camera in his home for 45 minutes. “And I just slipped into that Nighthawks voice. Nighthawks was amazing. It was so good they had to get rid of it. Kill it before it grows. I was lucky to come across Anne Enright because I think a lot of people would have thought, ‘It’s not going to work’.”
More than 30 years later another great Irish writer, Lisa McGee, cast him as Uncle Colm in Derry Girls. McGee tells me over the phone: “I wrote Uncle Colm and then my exec producer said, ‘Well, obviously that’s Kevin McAleer’ right away. And I said ‘Oh my God, of course. It’s so clearly Kevin.’ So we asked Kevin, and he filmed himself and it was absolutely hysterical. Uncle Colm is one of Liam [Neeson’s] favourite characters. Colm reminds him of his dad and his dad’s friends. I think separately from that he was a fan of Kevin. I think that was probably one of the reasons we secured Liam [for the show], because he wanted to be talked to death by Kevin McAleer.”
McAleer thinks Derry Girls perfectly captures the everyday reality of living through the Troubles, “that mixture of the trivial and the profound ... I remember after Bloody Sunday we went into school. There was the general assembly, and it wasn’t the principal, it was this very articulate French teacher. She got up and made this very short, very emotional speech and we were told to go home and mourn. I remember the mixture of elation because it’s Monday morning and you’re told you’re going to be sent home again, but ... That pretty big ‘but’ was mixed in.”
He ignored the conflict for a long time. “Not just in my comedy, but in my life as well. It was too big to engage with. Obviously, you were very aware when things got really bad — when internment happened, when Bloody Sunday happened. You were very aware that something was spiralling out of control, that the ground was just disappearing beneath your feet. You could either ignore it, or you could get involved in some very dubious activities and end up in jail or dead. And I was nowhere near having to toss a coin on that one. I just ignored it and got out of there when I was 18.”
A lot of interviewers would ask me about the North and say, ‘Do you not feel like addressing the Troubles?’ And I didn’t. I was quite happy to talk nonsense about four owls standing in a row
When did he start doing material about it? “It was around the ceasefires.” He laughs. “That was my brave stance. It was obviously all very suppressed and compressed in my mind. A lot of interviewers up to that point would ask me about the North and say, ‘Do you not feel like addressing the Troubles?’ And I said, ‘No. No, I don’t.’ And I didn’t. I was quite happy to talk nonsense about four owls standing in a row.”
He lives in Omagh now, in the house he grew up in. He and Valerie and their children returned there from London in 1997, a couple of years after his father died. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there when I was 18 but going back was a good thing. I really enjoyed it the second time around.” Ironically his three children are really into organic farming, though there’s no farm any more. “They rebelled against me rebelling against farming. My dad would be very tickled.”
We talk a little about mixing comedy and tragedy in writing. He’s not, as you might expect, a fan of fellow Irish absurdist Flann O’Brien. “I remember trying to read it on very smoky buses from Dublin to Omagh, which probably isn’t the ideal place to read anybody, but I wasn’t gripped.” He’s much more into Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, the plot of which he recounts for me with great pleasure. “It’s very sad, but it’s hilarious.”
He considered writing a book himself. He spent a lot of time researching a novel about JFK but it ended up being a poem instead. “A lot of research went into that poem. It did condense the novel for me, to my satisfaction.”
His real craft is stand-up, though during lockdown he almost began to think of himself as retired. “Then, out of the blue, on maybe March this year, I suddenly got the spark back. I just thought, ‘I could do shows again’. And I went from that to being very excited at the idea, and I set up some shows and, just by a happy coincidence, the third series of Derry Girls aired.”
What does it feel like on stage when things are going well? “Fantastic. I’m not a very good swimmer but if I was a good swimmer, I imagine that that’s what it would feel like. When I got up there and realised I had something that would let me swim and not sink, it was a great feeling.” He smiles. “To be able to stay afloat by your words.”
Kevin McAleer’s Why Am I Here debuts at the Viking Theatre, Dublin, on September 6th. kevinmcaleer.ie
‘Incredibly tenacious’: Anne Enright on Kevin McAleer
“I think I first saw Kevin doing his slide show at a late-night gig somewhere in Temple Bar in 1988. Maybe it was in Eustace Street, in the space that later became the IFI. The slide show was more surreal than his Nighthawks stuff — there was a picture of a reclining (very butch) kangaroo that he turned into the funniest thing you have ever seen. The show was all repetition and escalation, and his timing was relentless (thinking now about how absurdity either makes you not care or laugh until you feel sick, he did the latter).
“There might have been technical issues with the slides. Kevin came in with the monologue instead. I shot a piece and showed it to David Blake Knox, who was the series producer and he laughed like a drain. It was, on a fast-moving show, hugely risky to put out a single shot of a slow talker for five to seven minutes, so we really argued the scripts. Kevin is incredibly tenacious. He said the words ‘It might have been shorter’ would be written on my headstone (not a bad idea).
“I think his slide shows and archive work showed him to be really ahead of his time, but it was the simplicity of the monologues that made them truly brilliant. It’s possible he told me that he had never read The Poor Mouth by Flann O’Brien. But he came from the same soil that produced The Butcher Boy in 1993, which also had that feeling of being traditional and disruptive at the same time.”
