Quarehawk

Anyone who tried to order balcony seat tickets for this gig online got the message “No seats available for your selection”, giving the wrong impression that the event had sold out. Actually what happened was the opposite - the balcony wasn’t in use because they knew they couldn’t fill it. This is hardly surprising though - Sean Hughes hasn’t really done anything to keep himself in the Irish spotlight since leaving “Never Mind The Buzzcocks”.

This show wasn’t publicized much. You get the suspicion he was just over visiting his parents for the Bank Holiday weekend and decided to chance his arm with a gig while he was here.

If so, I’m glad he did. Because he’s still good.

If there’s a theme to tonight’s performance it’s “Getting Old”. The former hot new talent of Irish comedy is 41 now, and he certainly harps on about it a lot. To be fair he doesn’t look much older, for a man you assume to have been living a celebrity drug and alcohol party lifestyle. He’s still the same gangly shape with the same hair. He hasn’t got fat or bald. The opening to this show is a little more melancholic than what you’d expect though. He’s only had one proper relationship he explains, has no kids and isn’t really able for the whole ‘dating scene’ anymore. This leads into a riff off some of the lonely heart columns he’s brought along.

Speaking of which, he’s brought along an unusual amount of props. There’s a stuffed duck, bottles of lotion from the hotel (The Westbury, so don’t feel too bad for him), a few newspapers and who knows what else up there on a couple of tables.

He recounts his stint on Coronation street, playing a love rat. And has the typical wide-ranging comments on all sorts of the mundane, shoes, tic tacs, his bins, and graffiti. A kid on my street did the funniest bit of graffiti I’ve ever seen. Underneath a For Sale sign in front of a house he wrote “Again?”

“Seanie’s Show !” some girl screams out, apropos of nothing. He nods but doesn’t take up the thread, sticking to his script. There’s not much room for ad-libbing here. This script is fairly tight. He establishes a few running gags early and keeps working in call backs to them throughout. Particularly to his point about parents using dyslexia as an excuse for their child’s every shortcoming. “Crafted” would be a good word to describe this set.

Ah the old Sean’s Show on Channel 4. A generation of ex-students smiled in the dark at the memory. Remember how it used to break off every so often with a change of lighting so that he was alone in the spotlight to give his monologue? Well he did that tonight as well, once. The lights changed and he stood there while a bit of some love song played. Then returned abruptly.

What he pointedly doesn’t have are jokes about the quirks of Irish life. This would normally be a comedy club standard, but he presumably doesn’t have any reference point for that kind of material, having been out of the country for 10 years. A fact you could tell anyway from his accent which has gone very English. Although to be honest Sean Hughes never really sounded Irish to begin with.

There’s a drunken shout from down among the tables. Hughes turns and runs over to his props and comes back carrying something. “Here’s a plate of biscuits” he says going down to some girls at the front, “No go on, take the whole plate”. I don’t know why that was so funny, you had to be there. It was surreal. Talk about confusing a heckler.

“Have you not got a girlfriend?” he asks a mortified punter. “Here, I have something for you”. And hands over a bottle of hand lotion. “By the way, will you women ever leave this stuff alone?” he scolds. “There’s a reason hotels always leave it beside a box of tissues”

At some Feile or Fleadh in England, in a field stuffed to the gills with Irish, he tells us he did a bit of compereing, asking the mob “Is anyone in from across the water?” which caused an eruption of cheering from the thousands of homesick boozy Paddys. Then after the clamour died down - “Well Bonjour”. Heh. Well okay, I don’t know if that actually happened but his telling of it was hilarious.

A few gags about Disney World, some risky material about Downs Syndrome kids, as well as the comedic easy pickings of Paris Hilton and text messaging. He nearly died in the tsunami, but has plenty of lighthearted stories about it.

It’s a funny show. Hughes still has that deadpan way of delivering a punchline, and a goofy style of acting out. And he isn’t afraid to mix in some of his politics, which lean socialist/liberal like most comedians. “Why should we pay to keep murderers locked up instead of executing them ?” he asks, “Because that’s the price you pay for being a human being”.

For some reason he commits a human rights violation later himself by playing a bit of that awful song, by Kid Creole I think, Stool Pigeon (Ha ta ta taaaah!), but promises to replace that tune in our heads by playing a better one at the end.

So I suppose that the vibe on Saturday night was this : He’s no better or worse than any number of comics around at the moment, but for those of us now in our 30s, Sean Hughes is an affectionate link to a fondly remembered period in our lives. A lot of the crowd there would have been in college in the early 90’s. And Hughes at that time was the Irish comedian we could most relate to. His brand of scruffy mixed with intelligence mixed with posh Dublin is basically a living caricature of the type of creature you met on campus in those days.

On the downside it was a fairly short performance, and he started to lose the crowd towards the finish. A dim murmur was audible as several restless tables had begun to chat among themselves during his ‘Burying a dead dog’ routine at the end.

As promised, leaving the stage he put on a song by The Waterboys. How appropriate. One early 90s nostalgic student favourite playing us out with another.