The Cat Laughs 2013 - Opening Night

Written by: Jay Richardson
Published: Friday 31st May 2013

The opening night of the Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny always has a 'calm before the gathering storm' feel. Crowds seem to have picked up again this year, with more sellouts posted in the box office and virtual sellouts for the first two shows. Moreover, the new sponsorship deal with Sky seems to have got tongues wagging.

Chris O'Dowd, John Hannah and Charlie Brooker are all appearing at the festival this weekend, attending the second series premieres of Sky shows Moone Boy and A Touch Of Cloth. Meanwhile, Neil Delamere, Colin Murphy, Aisling Bea and other comics are piloting a new show for Irish TV, Next Week's News.

It will be interesting to see if this unprecedented focus on broadcast comedy has an impact on the festival's atmosphere. Certainly, the comedians have an opinion. At The Big Festival Preview, compere Karl Spain (pictured) bemoaned the loss of a drinks sponsor and with it, the free booze tokens that the acts usually snaffle. Kevin Bridges wondered if 200 drunk people in a hotel basement could really take Rupert Murdoch's empire "to the next level"?

Delivering a few odds and sods of new and established material, Bridges was on fine form headlining the gig, prowling the stage with confidence. Touching on his arrest in Killarney last year for a drunken contretemps, he summarised the incident with a "when in Rome ..." shrug that the crowd lapped up. Despite his arrival in the front ranks of arena comics, the Scot retains his man-of-the-people charm, mockingly musing on lad's holidays and the mates of his that are "unemployed as fuck".

Spain is an assured host of these occasions and derived great mischief seguing from observations on Jimmy Savile to introducing child's keyboard-wielding David O'Doherty. The latter's mounting frustration with the world and modern technology, invariably bookended with the Dubliner thumping a minor chord or thrusting his head back and howling "nooooooooooo!", only gets funnier as his despair intensifies. In almost every show, he unveils a standout song that just stuns you with its rascally audacity. His uplifting tune about a friend having a wank on a bike is my undoubted early highlight of the festival.

For anyone impressed by the appearances of Eleanor Tiernan (pictured) on The Alternative Comedy Experience, her yen for extreme self-deprecation is even more compelling live. Much more comfortable in her persona in recent years, she recalled her debut at the Cat Laughs and the much reported controversy of Doug Stanhope claiming Irish women were too ugly to rape, disclosing her own possible role in the tabloid scandal...

An unbilled addition to the line-up, the force-of-nature that is Sanderson Jones got the crowd pumped with his revelations about their online behaviour, having trawled through the internet presences seeking dirt. In truth, he discovered more inexplicable oddness than comedy gold but his larger-than-life appearance and force of personality brooked no dissent and even the victims seemed to enjoy themselves.

Earlier in the night, the first show of the weekend, Kilkenny Exposed, in which festival godfather Dom Irrera, Barry Murphy and Delamere ripped the piss out of recent local news stories, proved a bit of a damp squib.

Host Colm O'Regan is one of the more accomplished comics performing with a laptop and was consistently amusing the crowd. But when the panel arrived they could only summon fitful laughs. Irrera especially often seemed lost and was disappointed that a tale he recalled of a wedding turning into a bloodbath didn't generate the response he'd hoped.

Seasoned comic that he is, he highlighted his floundering and got the crowd back on side. Delamere and Murphy as his blonde wig-sporting German alter-ego Gunther Grun had more success with tales of small town corruption and escaped pot-bellied Vietnamese pigs. But only the presence of a famed local alligator wrestler really gave the gig a finale and saved it.