History, Mystery and the Wild Atlantic Way
Published: Monday 17th September 2018
One of the many brilliant things at The Vodafone Comedy Carnival, in Galway in late October, is an event that actually takes you away from the city's stages. Now that's alternative comedy for you.
Running on both Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th, The Wild Atlantic Wahey Comedy Mystery Tour takes a busload of around 100 lucky punters along a spectacular section of the Wild Atlantic Way, stopping off at various venues on that celebrated route, while a resident MC adds a gag-laden soundtrack to the sightseeing on-bus bits. Grand.
What's the Wild Atlantic Way? It's a famously scenic coastal road awash with beaches and bays, cliffs and coves and, for that weekend in October, comedians. The Mystery Tour heads west into Connemara, dropping people off at a specially-selected bunch of pubs where top-notch festival comics will perform. It's like a regular comedy bill, but in-between acts you get some of the best views, ever.
The worlds of comedy and sightseeing tend to dovetail rather nicely. If the festival is in a brilliant place and lots of suitably enthusiastic comics are on board, it makes perfect sense to mix them up. At the Edinburgh Fringe, for example, Arthur Smith is famed for his alternative walking tour of the Royal Mile, while Barry Ferns makes novel use of Edinburgh's mountain, Arthur's Seat, by staging regular shows at the top. And no, the mountain isn't named after Arthur Smith.
A comedy festival is the perfect excuse for a city break, anyway. Galway is well-known for being wonderfully festive whenever you arrive, in truth, with music bursting out of pubs and street performers entertaining the al-fresco drinkers and diners. During The Vodafone Comedy Carnival, it's like comedy Christmas. As the festival's new artistic director Martyne Green admits, it's "such a vibrant city all year round but there really is something special about that last week in October - you can feel the funny in the air."
One of the major venues is the now iconic Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent, which occupies the city's famous Eyre Square throughout the week, as the epicentre of the fest's busy comedy village. In fact, all of the venues are in the city centre - well, apart from those Wild Atlantic tour pubs - and many are legendary in their own right.
Visiting a bunch of those would be a good Galway mystery history tour: from the famous live spot Róisín Dubh - which has hosted everyone from De La Soul, Ellie Goulding and Ed Sheeran to Stewart Lee, Doug Stanhope and Sarah Millican - and the grand 1820s-built Town Hall Theatre, to a new addition this year, the Mick Lally Theatre, home to the acclaimed theatre company Druid (it's on Druid Lane).
There are over 100 acts doing 75 shows across 18 venues altogether, but if you're painfully indecisive they've also introduced a Comedy Club Crawl on the Friday night this year, which is like a traditional pub crawl, but with comedians. You buy a ticket, and wind up in three venues where cool shows are taking place. You can't go wrong really - corking line-up.
As for The Wild Atlantic Wahey Comedy Mystery Tour, that's now a festival highlight after they gave it a successful dry-run last year (well, maybe not a dry run, given that the idea is to visit several pubs). Musical comic and recent Irish Comedian of the Year Steve Bennett set to do this year's tour guide bit, and doors open at 11.45am - the bus doors, that is.
Then after about four hours of revelry, they drop everyone off for the evening's festivities back in Galway. Always a splendid place to disembark.
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