Shane Clifford on finding humour in the darkness

By Ellie O’Byrne

It started by accident. Shane Clifford quit his job in Tesco and went travelling in Asia. On his return, while waiting to enrol in a programming course at Tralee IT, he started making short comedy videos for his own entertainment and posting them on social media.

Three years on, he’s something of a cult success: heralded by the Rubberbandits’ Blindboy Boatclub as “the best comedian in Ireland”, Clifford has a Facebook page, Shane’s Brilliant Page, with over 10,000 likes and his videos garner thousands of views.

Inspired by his love of cinema, the videos often feature Clifford in multiple roles. Nipples that play Marvin Gaye songs, how to get away with never making cups of tea for people, and “conquering” panic attacks by shivering in a corner under a stained duvet: his own unique brand of humour is surreal and imaginative, and served up with a hefty dose of darkness.

The frequent references to depression, isolation and anxiety are all too real for Clifford, who has struggled with mental health issues for “as long as he can remember”, and who says he only turned a corner in his mid-twenties when he sought help and began taking medication.

“It was only when I started taking medication that I started doing the videos. I had been extremely withdrawn. Maybe this isn’t the proper thing to say, but really dark things make me laugh. When I look back on ways that I’ve been and moods I’ve been in, sometimes it’s scary, but it kind of inspires me too.

“I get a lot of people saying they feel the same way so I think those things resonate with people: people like to laugh at things that they didn’t know they were allowed to laugh at. It becomes a shared experience.”

Now, the 32-year-old Kerry man has turned to stand-up. Although he’s only been performing for just under two years, he’s reaching impressive heights, too. Fresh from a stint at the Vodaphone Comedy Festival, he’s headed to the Edinburgh Festival on August 13 to perform in the semi-finals of the UK’s So You Think You’re Funny stand-up competition. It’s a competition of very high calibre: Irish winners have included Tommy Tiernan, Dylan Moran and David O’Doherty.

He’s also about to embark on a series of small gigs around the country, the better to prepare for his solo debut in Whelan’s in October.

The intensely pressured career path of stand-up may not sound like a natural choice for someone who suffers with anxiety issues?

“It’s true that I never thought standing in front of a room full of people was something I could do,” he says. “When I’ve bombed I’ve wanted to just crawl into bed for a week.”

“My first gig was horrific. It was a tiny room in Killarney with about five people in it. I didn’t sleep for a week beforehand, and I was awful: I did seven minutes and got two laughs. There was an old man there from Co Down and he was asleep.”

Yet Clifford is hooked. Like many comedians, he says, he’s in it for the approval: “I think a lot of stand-up comedians can be very shy. I think it’s something lacking in you, that you need to be loved by as many people as possible and stand-up is the quickest way to get it. It’s laugh heroin: the quickest and most powerful fix of approval.”

He appeared on Alison Spittle’s Culchie Club on RTÉ, a show about life outside of Dublin. Is being from Tralee important to his work and his worldview? He doesn’t really consider himself a regional comedian, and wishes the scene would grow a bit more outside of Dublin and Cork.

“There is isolation, and maybe the inferiority of being a culchie feeds into it, but not on a conscious level. I haven’t really thought about it much, but I can see the bleakness and the grimness that comes from living in Tralee in my videos.”

Clifford isn’t producing videos as prolifically these days, as he concentrates on writing stand-up material. “Hopefully I can sustain a living from this, either in Ireland or the UK, because I really, really love it,” he says. “It’s one of those things where a lightbulb went off, and it’s like, ‘this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.’”