Last Word
Des Bishop - A Live Wire
After almost two years appearing on stage for up to five nights per week, Des Bishop is relaxing for a change. The London-born, New York-raised and Irish resident (since 1990, which makes him one of ours, surely?) has worked in this country as a comedian for more than 10 years.
Initially, he began hosting shows at Dublin's International Comedy Cellar, a venue/event originally set up by the likes of Ardal O'Hanlon, of Father Ted, and Barry Murphy, of Apres Match. But over the years, Bishop has branched beyond the usual constraints for Irish-based comedians. The voice, face and blogger behind ESB Customer Supply's energy-saving campaign has never been one to grasp the easy option. Rather, based on his own experiences, he grasps the nettles of social issues such as poverty, working for a minimum wage and testicular cancer.
Back in Ireland for the foreseeable future, Bishop has recently been experiencing something very unusual: he has been living in his house seven nights in a row, a state of domestic affairs that hasn't occurred, he says, in more than four years. "It's amazing the things that get put to one side," he remarks. "The simplicity of just doing things around the house, getting back to normal friendships, all that kind of stuff."
Bishop is a very aware person, not at all like some comedians, who play it safe and cosy as they rake in the money and the fame. His style, he admits, is more casually observational than studiously joke-oriented. "Being observational has been my style since I became comfortable on stage, which is when I started to talk about things I felt I really should be talking about. Recently, for instance, I was in the company of some comedians - whose names I won't mention - and I became acutely aware that I'm definitely more serious than a lot of my colleagues! I naturally want to talk about things that I find interesting, and to look at the things that crop up more seriously."
He admits that such an approach can work against him. "It's okay if I have a one-hour show, because I can start off making certain points, but there is loads of time to come back to the funny stuff. But if I'm somewhere - and it's always outside Ireland - that I have, say, about 10 or 15 minutes on stage, then it's not always easy to impress people. And this is perhaps because I'm just out of practice of being a normal, funny comedian."
Yet, Bishop is good at something that the 'normal, funny comedian' is not: he is adept at advancing the notion of what the best kind of comedy can do, which is to make people think almost as much as they laugh.
Such a modus operandi, he says, was more an evolution of his style than any strategic, or even halfbaked, decision. "At the start, when I began to think I wanted to do something different, I guess I was motivated by the fact that at around the age of 20 I became a lot more serious about how I was living my life," he comments.
"Around that time, I also began to experience how people could get marginalised in their lives. And the people who lived that lifestyle have a different sense of humour, which appealed to me. So I started doing some television shows, which in turn guided me to talk about social situations in a funny way. That was almost like an accident, but it definitely changed my comic style."
Over the past five years, television shows such as The Des Bishop Work Experience, about workers on the minimum wage, Joy In The Hood, about life and laughs in the inner city, and In The Name Of The Fada, about learning to speak Irish fluently, not only catapulted Bishop out of cult-dom and into the mainstream, but also helped change people's expectations of him as a comedian.
"Luckily enough, the TV shows are quite different from each other, although they might be styled in a similar format," he says. "So, people's expectations don't get too bedded down, because different people are shown different things through the shows. But then, I don't like doing the same things all the time. I nearly went to China to learn how to speak the language, but the procedure became too complicated. I'm glad that it didn't happen, because it was too close a format to what I did before."
His time in the Gaeltacht was an "amazing experience", he says, and not as tricky as he had initially thought. "It wasn't difficult - but only because it was so intense in terms of the amount of learning and using I was doing. There's only one way to learn any language fluently, and that's if you devote time to it. I don't think any language can be learned properly as a hobby; of course, it's good that they are learned as a hobby, but I really think if you want to speak it properly, then you have to invest time in it."
What about his reputation of being a comedian who can hit as much a raw nerve as a funny bone? That comes, he reveals, from years of experience of judging the correct balance. "I'm not so arrogant that I can completely dismiss the savviness of an audience. I know there are times in my life when I have pushed the audience to a place where they are no longer enjoying it and where they're so uncomfortable that the atmosphere is gone.
Sometimes that's good because I'm talking about things that an audience needs to be uncomfortable about and other times I think I'm just not doing it right, because there's no need for the audience to be as awkward as it is."
Over the years, he has found better ways at getting as deep, awkward and raw as possible without moving too far away from putting on a really funny, entertaining show. "The better you get at putting that across the more powerful it can be," he contends. "Comedy is at its most powerful when it's both deeply unnerving and unbelievably entertaining. I know a lot of comedians that pride themselves when a moment in their shows goes a bit far, but I don't."
With regard to his involvement in ESB Customer Supply's energy saving campaign, Bishop's input is a smart move: putting a well-liked and credible public face onto an important issue.
"It's just trying to highlight saving energy to people," Bishop says . "All I know about it is that when it comes down to cutting down on my use of electricity I'm quite bad at it. Yet I'm aware and I believe that we need to be a lot more energy conscious, but like many people I'm bad at doing something about it."
It's a good time to get people to change their behaviour, reckons Bishop. "Everyone is looking at ways to save money these days and that is something people plug into possibly more than a green message.
"I needed to change my behaviour for a long time but didn't and this is a perfect opportunity to do that. I'm not interested in being terribly funny about it, but it's a light and interesting way of letting people know what to do."
