The Cat Laughs Festival 2013 - Full Report

Written by: Jay Richardson
Published: Tuesday 4th June 2013

The Cat Laughs Festival in Ireland celebrates its twentieth anniversary next year, with the promise of established favourites from the past coming back. But it's reached an intriguing crossroads.

With a new festival popping up every summer weekend across the UK and Ireland, Kilkenny's combination bills of headliners no longer seem as distinctive as they once did. And in cash-straightened times, the line-ups aren't as international or immediately impressive either. Even so, there's a rare, booze-fuelled magic here. Arriving at The Kitten Club, a confused, ten-man stag-do found Bec Hill animating a Jay Foreman song about dinosaurs and David O'Doherty in his pyjamas performing for a bunch of kids.

Regardless, this festival has a peerless history. It may seem odd but my favourite show of the weekend was The Mitch Hedberg Tribute Show, hosted by Hedberg's widow, the Canadian comic Lynn Shawcroft, and Dom Irrera, a veteran of 17 Kilkennys. The Italian-American recalled with affection Hedberg's promise to get off drugs and get healthy by restricting himself to alcoholism. Hedberg's last visit to the festival in 1999 resulted in Shawcroft slamming a door on his leg during an argument and Phil Kay drinking him into an absinthe-induced stupor.

'Cover comedy' hopefully won't become 'a thing'. But as a one-off, performed in the back room of a pub by actor-y comics like Brendan Dempsey, Aisling Bea and Barry Murphy, with Hedberg's countryman Will Durst, this tribute was decidedly bittersweet, a reminder of this late stand-up's distinctive brilliance but also of what comedy lost when he died. Thankfully eschewing the opportunity to do impersonations, the quartet simply let Hedberg's surreal inventiveness speak for itself.

This was also the first year of Sky's long-term sponsorship of the festival. What does it mean? Will they seek to sponsor more live comedy, aligning it with their sitcoms as they have here? Maybe they want to set up their own Live At The Apollo-style stand-up showcase? Is the commitment to comedy, as Stewart Lee has suggested, just a further attempt to detoxify the Murdoch brand after the phone-hacking scandal? Because, if so, on this evidence, their charm offensive is working.

Premiering the second series of Moone Boy (pictured) here was apposite, as both Chris O'Dowd's co-writer Nick Vincent Murphy and the show's animators, Cartoon Saloon, are from the city. But it was canny too. Refund people's admission so they get in free, give them the first series of Moone Boy on DVD for free, add plentiful bags of popcorn, have the witty O'Dowd and Murphy stay for a Q&A afterwards, that and an overpowering sense of local talent done good - well, it all makes for an appreciative audience to capture for your cameras.

Still, that shouldn't detract from Moone Boy being one of our best new sitcoms. Although a cinema wasn't the ideal place to see it, the opening two episodes of the second series sustain the delights of the first, its gently fey quirkiness inviting obvious comparisons with the more madcap Father Ted. Opening against the backdrop of the Italia 90 World Cup and Martin's graduation to a bigger school, the series is warmly endearing yet instinctively cruel to its central characters. It's got heart and growing pains.

The apparently doomed efforts of God-bothering Dessie (Ronan Raftery) to ingratiate himself with Liam Moone (Peter McDonald) after getting Fidelma (Clare Monnelly) knocked up are painfully funny, while Ian O'Reilly as the cheerfully camp Pádraic enriches every scene he's in. The fond chemistry and figment-of-imagination daftness between O'Dowd and the immensely likeable David Rawle as Martin reaches its height with a beautifully played homage to a classic 80s movie.

Meanwhile, what about the festival's main draw, stand-ups performing their own material? Although there were quite a few sold out gigs, others were far from full and you wonder if these suffered against O'Dowd's (free) Hollywood allure.

Being a 30 Rock fan, I was hugely looking forward to seeing Judah Friedlander and only slightly disappointed. Where most comics seek to establish their kinship and similarities with the audience, his absolute commitment to his stand-alone, super-heroic World Champion persona is invigorating. Declaring an intention to run for US president, casually throwing out the number of "chicks" he's slept with in a flat monotone, I urge anyone who gets a chance to see him in the UK to grab the opportunity.

Unfortunately, I caught him at a 6pm show. And despite the presence of fans who'd obviously read his karate book, the World Champion invites a sustained degree of audience participation, as he solicits questions he can riff with or slam down. And while Friedlander certainly has the arsenal to deal with a sober, possibly intimidated crowd not jumping on board, contributions weren't too forthcoming and the gig was the poorer for it. I certainly wish I'd piped up, so I implore anyone going to see him this week to give him something to work with, because his immediate, brook-no-shit comebacks are a delight.

One of the peculiarities of this festival (and having a free, all-access pass) is that you can get to see a couple of comics perform more-or-less the same set four or five times as the bills overlap, depending on your preferences. This year for me, that honour fell to David O'Doherty (pictured) and Andrew Maxwell. If not exactly thrilling seeing the same bits again, it's instructive comprehending which routines of new and established material get pulled out to appeal to this specific locale, and to see O'Doherty for example in a sequence about bullshit pub conversations, allude to an Irish soap opera twice and its British equivalent on two other occasions. Were they accidental slips? Did it even matter?

Suffice to say, both he and Maxwell mixed up their sets enough to keep them consistently entertaining. Despite efforts to give him the hook, the latter defiantly ploughed on as the closing act of the festival's final Monday night gig, if only to continue his treatise on race relations with a spirited young Polish woman in the balcony.

Another oddity of this place is seeing acts who don't normally compere being asked to host. And, as it panned out, I saw plenty of Chris Kent on MC duties, which was unequivocally a good thing. I don't think Kent did himself justice with his so-so debut Edinburgh Fringe show last year, because the young Corkman has massive potential and is already frighteningly accomplished. With his stilted yet rhythmic delivery, he's far from a natural compere. But his anecdotes are dense with surprising twists at his own expense, the story of his night terrors following an evening on the cheese being a personal favourite.

Mike Wilmot rarely comperes too, so it was a joy to witness the grizzled, bear-like Canadian manfully make a dirty fist of it, on a bill with Dom Irrera, Will Durst and Rich Hall that was defined by middle-aged, North Americans carping about their wives. As a light-touch political satirist with the least exposure here, Durst had to work hardest but knew he could rely on George W Bush to guarantee him bellylaughs without breaking sweat. The rest are all Kilkenny veterans, safe pairs of hands if you ignore Irrera's claims to have had sex with Wilmot's daughters, a rare instance of the Canadian being out-blued. Best of all, Hall delivered a sublime set with his guitar, the highlight of which was a rasping Dylan pastiche about the old master's waning powers.

Standards here are impressively high but not every show was a success. Following a series of reportedly great gigs, Seann Walsh, a late replacement for Marcus Brigstocke, came unstuck with some persistent heckling, took the hump, dropped his mic and started performing exclusively to the more appreciative front rows. Grimly compelling to watch, this was an example of an irresistible force (his banker material about tripping in the street and banging your head on the bus) against an immovable object (pissed idiots not realising how loud they were). Unable to hide his irritation, he twice came storming back to justify his headline status, only for one man's inability to comprehend mime completely flooring him. For a time, it looked like the show was going to end with Walsh left speechless on stage, his jaw stuck on the floor.

Elsewhere, the edition of The Big News Show I saw was fitfully funny but the personalities on stage didn't gel as well as they might. Hosted by the game, politically inclined Matt Forde, with Will Durst, Abie Philbin Bowman, Gráinne Maguire and Kevin Gildea poring over pre-prepared news stories, the show could have done with either greater preparation or more spontaneity, as it was rather a bodged compromise. Forde is a fine chairman for these kind of discussions about Westminster but his lack of knowledge about Irish politics meant the show started sluggishly and never really recovered. Far better to have used him as one of the panellists.

For sheer consistency, Holly Walsh (pictured) really impressed. The recently-married comic, on her "honeymoon" of sorts, embraced her festival debut with a couple of excellent sets and endeared herself through some assured banter with crowds who really took to her.

Anthony King was the slow-burner of the weekend, his psycho songs creepier than most in the overcrowded genre of lovelorn, guitar-strumming weirdos. The prissily sneery, camp inflection of his threats remained with you long after he left the stage.

Special mentions too for Eric Lalor, who's developed into a rock-solid club comic, expertly mining his rough, Ballymun locale for some memorable routines. And Tony Law, who in lieu of having any new material, simply turned up on stage with a small tree and proceeded to address it, before narrowing his eyes to denounce the Irish as "fuckers" for approximately 15 minutes. Sure, he was floundering and the reek of desperation was palpable. But the Canadian is at a point in his career where people love him for such unsettling goofiness. And he might have a life on easy street ahead of him if he can get away with this again and again.