Restructuring Delamere

OFFALY comedian Neil Delamere will be at Glór on January 28 with his new show Restructuring.

He’s already been on the go for about eight weeks and there are another four months left.
“I just started there at the beginning of November and it’ll go to April. It’s a new show every year; it’s the usual craic, messing around with the audience at the beginning of the show because that makes every show individual and spontaneous. You have a bit of craic with them and you can weave that in during the show. The show is called Restructuring so it’s about what’s going on in the country and really what’s going on personally, too. It’s a catch-all title I suppose,” he says.
The type of humour that works in the TV shows he has made his name on wouldn’t really work on a tour lasting so long, he says.
“When you do something that’s topical like The Panel or The Blame Game it’s all very transient and it’s gone almost by the time it’s broadcast because news changes so quickly. But by its nature, for a stand-up show, you have to do stuff that lasts longer.”
Delamare qualified as a software engineer but like many others, he fled the IT industry after its collapse in the early part of the last decade.
While he had never performed as a comedian prior to 2004, he was known for his sense of humour.
“I was a bit of a joker in school but I always knew where the line was. I never saw the point of taking the piss until you got detention. You might as well take the piss until just before you get detention and then stop. No matter how good a joke was, you don’t want to be sitting there at five o’clock, ‘Oh yeah, that was really funny’ while you’re writing out lines.”
He says he loves the variety of stand-up comedy and when he began performing, he tried to immerse himself in it. “When I started I just tried to watch as much as I could and listen to as much as I could. I found Richard Prior absolutely amazing. In terms of delivery style, Ross Noble, Jimmy Carr, Tommy Tiernan and Dara O’Briain were very good. The great thing about stand-up is that there’s so many different styles. If you’re not in the mood for one style one day, there’s always something else. If you don’t want long, funny stories, you can watch someone who does sharp one-liners for 20 minutes.”
Going around the country with the show has the potential to get a bit tiresome, but he says he won’t let that happen. “That’s where talking to the audience comes in. You can chat to them and refer back to them. Eighty times isn’t actually that often but when you could get tired is during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. You write a show, perform it for the year, do it 80 times and then you go to Edinburgh and do it 30 times in a row. That’s in a short space of time and that becomes a test. I don’t know what I’d do without the messing around and the interaction. I often wonder how actors keep it fresh though, doing the same thing over and over.”
While he feels he has a fair idea of what will work, he still feels it is important to get some feedback before going on the road. “You get an instinct after a while but the only way to find out if it’s any good is to go and do it. You go and do small gigs, not the likes of Glór, smaller places around the country where people know it’s not in its finished form. You refine and polish it until you’ve something you can bring on tour.”
Irish comedy has come a long way in a short space of time. Neil feels its development was linked to the economic success of the Celtic Tiger years, adding that the recession will have an adverese impact.
“I suppose the flourishing happened the same time as the boom. If everything was booming why wouldn’t comedy? It’s a great thing because the more comedians there are, the more clubs there are and the more clubs there are the more comedians – I think it’s called a virtuous circle. There’ll definitely be an impact from the recession. The big touring acts will have a larger base so they’ve a better chance.
“There was a generation of younger people, like there were in business, who weren’t afraid to take risks. They’d feel they’d get a job doing something if it didn’t work out. Now people go ‘Jesus-I have a job I’ll have to hold onto it’,” he noted.