Quarehawk

“Ladies and Gentlemen, would you welcome please your clown for this evening … Andrew Maxwell !!!!”

And our clown for this evening in no rush. He totters out like a little puppet, with a hilarious grin on his face. Here is a man in a very good mood, and he spends a minute just walking back and forth smiling and waving cheesily, like as if Toymaster were showcasing this year’s newest fad - a wind-up clockwork comedian. 33 years old and not a hint of baldness. The bastard.

He starts, in time-honoured comedy tradition, with a bit of the old back-and-forth with random mortified audience members. “Where are you from Brother ?”, “Where do you go to College, Sister?”. I don’t know what all the brother and sister stuff is about. Regional affectation I suppose. Makes him sound a bit like an Evangelical Preacher from Alabama though.

Replies from the audience send him into short hilarious segues, and you can see that it all comes naturally to him, and he’d be just as funny if you and he were having a chat at the bar. And that’s it : Andrew Maxwell is like your funny mate whom you see down the pub once a week ! A “Gas man” as we would say. A lot of people would contend that that’s the case with any comedian, but no way. You can enjoy the comedy character of Jimmy Carr, but if you spent a long train journey beside him listening to his Ba-dum Tish setup/punchline gags you’d eventually have to kick him in the stomach (Not that I imagine Jimmy Carr would act like that off stage - He’s probably a lovely bloke). But Andrew Maxwell doesn’t seem to have a “comedy character” separate from his own personality. You get the feeling this is how he acts normally. Just riffing about his life and stuff that amused him the other day, and laughing along as much as the audience. He’s having a hoot ! And if this stage persona is a fake then he’s a faker of considerable talent.

He spends a lot of the gig sitting, perched on on his high stool with his legs swinging, resting an arm on the mic stand. And working his way through a pint of Guinness each half. Somebody shouted something that I didn’t catch, and it got a laugh around him. “Hey” says Maxwell nodding in his direction, “Maybe we should team up”. Well, that’s a bit different from Jerry Sadowitz’s heckler retort - “I’m going to come down there and fucking kill you”.

“There’ll be none of that encore bullshit tonight. I’m just going to say it all, in two halves, and then fuck off”.

He’s a lot more light-hearted on stage than he is on The Panel, whereas I’d expected the opposite. Anyone who came hoping for scathing social commentary and bitter rants against the status quo is in for a let-down. “A lot of people want religion to go away”, says Maxwell, “But not me, because I’m a comedian”.

Originally from Kilbarrack and now living in London, “Nobody knows me in England” he laments. “And the only reason any of you guys know me is because my friend Dara O’Briain bought the rights to The Panel and put me on it”.

Oh interesting. So that’s how the panel works? It’s Dara O’Briain’s baby? I wondered how they chose their comedians. So it’s a bit of a club? Well alright, that’s no different to any other job, where who you know is important. And of course it’s very Irish as well. You can have talent and you can have hard work, but above all you have to have PULL.

Not that this matters. How someone gets the limelight isn’t important, as much as what they do with it once they have it. And Maxwell, with his terrific contributions to The Panel, and tonight’s performance, is doing his mate Dara O’Briain proud. Turns out he’s also buddies with Colin Murphy and Damien Dempsey, as revealed in a story about how the three of them went around the northside looking at bonfires one Halloween night. Dempsey probably got a song about drugs out of that (He’d get a song about drugs out of anything).

Several reviews have pegged Andrew Maxwell as an iconoclastic and anti-establishment, changing-your-mind-through-the-forum-of-humour type of comic, but this wasn’t the vibe on Thursday night.

Instead we had a more relaxing, medium-paced comedy. No scream-inducing burying-your-face-in-your-hands I-can’t-believe-he-just-said-that stuff here. He’s more interested in trying to understand the mentality of boy racers tricking out their cheap cars, and why anyone would vote Sinn Fein.

A naturally amusing guy, Maxwell’s easygoing palaver would be best enjoyed late-night over a few brewskis with your mates. You don’t so much howl laughing as nod along knowlingly with a stupid smirk on your face, and moreso if you’re a Dub or have at least lived in the capital for a while. Because a lot of his musing is very Dublin-centric.

I missed him on The Tubridy Show (Because why in hell’s name would I be watching The Tubridy Show?), where he says he “ranted” at the host. Heh. Good. I’ll keep an eye out on youtube for it.

“I’m a Northside knacker” he explains in his languid delivery. It’s not like his accent wouldn’t have told us that anyway. What he is actually though, is highly likeable. He is, tonight at least, to the 30 year old office workers what say, Eamon Holmes is to their parents. Pleasant. Easily digestible. Ok maybe that’s a strained comparison (Considering Eamon Holmes isn’t funny. Or a comedian), because it’s not to say that Maxwell’s material is sanitised or safe or watered-down or anything like that. Oh don’t worry. There are plenty of piss and poo and sex jokes.

It’s just that it’s a chatty kind of a performance, with no racing around the stage shouting. Although he does cut loose once, kicking over the stool and throwing the mic stand across the stage. But but this is just him acting out a character (that of a disgruntled viewer getting upset about the scores on one of the comedy panel shows on the BBC. His point being - who gives a toss about the “scores” on Have I Got News For You or Mock The Week or any of those others?).

Here’s a man with an inquisitive adventurous outlook on life, which he intimates has brought the police to his door more than once in his youth. He’s definitely no fan of going home sober and having an early night. So you can easily picture it when he tells us about his swimming with Fungi (Incidentally - How OLD is that blasted dolphin at this stage? Because Jesus, we’ve been hearing about him for at least 25 years. Or do they keep replacing Fungi, like Lassie?), and about the time he ended up drunkenly going down to the river to smoke pot and watch salmon leap, or wound up pissed in a warehouse with a crew of avid Sinn Feiners, or fought a massive tranny from Leeds in an argument over Star Wars.

A hasty heckler shouting for him to “do Bosco” gets his request granted, and is then put on the spot to provide a song for “Bosco” to sing. “You start us all off” the heckler is told as the whole of Vicar St turns expectantly to him. HA ! No sympathy from me Mr Loudmouth. Because I know that you and your ilk would happily take over and ruin every single comedy show if you were allowed to.

Andrew Maxwell has been at this a long time, and you can see how comfortable he is. And he makes the crowd comfortable. Turns out we’ll be seeing more of him on the box as well, since he’s filming a series for the Guardian where he “Goes around Ireland doing whatever [he] like[s]“. What a job !

And he wraps the night up with a gracious sigh “So you know folks, I’ve been in this game since I was seventeen …. and it’s nights like this I’m in it for. So thanks very much”.

Bow to the audience and exit stage left. What a gentleman.