Stand-up Dara’s always thinking on his feet

Named by Channel 4 as the 16th best comedian, Ó Briain is at his wittiest in new DVD, Craic Dealer, says Richard Fitzpatrick

DARA Ó Briain speaks quicker than most people, but what sets him apart is the speed of his thought. Ó Briain will disappear down the most bizarre byways, given half a chance, yet, somehow, manage to find his way back to the crossroads from whence he came.

During Craic Dealer, the live stand-up DVD released today, Ó Briain chats to a carpenter towards the front of his audience in the Edinburgh Playhouse.

Ó Briain tries to establish the carpenter’s speciality in house-building, but once he’s told he does “everything”, it’s all the Irish comic needs for a sham conversation.

“Just get Drew, he’ll do the lot.”

“But there’s nothing here; there’s just a tree.”

“Drew does everything. We plant trees and then we wait, and then Drew comes and everything gets done. He makes a house and some paper. It’s incredible what he gets out of it. Then, he makes a crown of the leaves, and we wear it in a pagan ceremony.

“Then, we go into a sauna and we beat ourselves with the twigs that he’s taken. Everything gets used by Drew. Drew is the most recycling man in the world. If there’s a squirrel, he cooks it and we eat it for lunch.

“Everything gets used — the eggs out of the nests; he makes a suit out of leaves. It’s incredible what Drew can do. You see a tree? Drew doesn’t see a tree — Drew sees a supermarket of excitements and possibilities.”

It’s a wonder Ó Briain, who polled at number 16 on Channel 4’s most recent Top 100 Stand-ups of All Time table, doesn’t tie himself up in verbal knots on these discursions.

“You trip over yourself on auto-rhetoric,” he says. “You’re just saying things and you’ve no idea if they’re going to tie up together, or if they’ll make any sense at all. You’re just rattling the things off. With the guy ‘you see a tree, he sees a supermarket of possibilities,’ I do remember taking a moment and going, ‘thank you, brain, for giving me that’ because you start the sentence, but you’ve no idea what’s going to come out at the other end of it.

“You’re hoping that it’s actually a coherent phrase. Often, it isn’t — it’s some rambling thing and you can juggle with that, but that one came out fully formed.”

Ó Briain studied mathematics and theoretical physics at UCD (or what he refers to as “Plato and triangles”) and has co-hosted a recent series of popular Stargazing Live shows with Brian Cox.

This month, Ó Briain hosts a six-part series, Science Club, on BBC Two. He’s joined by experts, from fields such as neuroscience, genetics and oceanography, and comedian side-kicks like Ed Byrne and Josh Widdicombe.

He gets up to all kinds of capers. There are fun experiments (like showing people how to pull their own DNA out of a cell using spit, washing-up liquid, pineapple juice and “strong vodka”) as well as interesting intellectual enquiries. Not everyone realises, perhaps, the role the push bike has had in improving humanity’s immune system.

“The bicycle indirectly was very good for genetics,” he says — “because it led to populations spreading out. It was good for the movement of people. The common ownership of the horse and the car also did it. It meant that rather than breeding in small villages, rather than having children with the girl next door, you could travel to the next village and the village after that, and have children with them, instead. That led to greater genetic diversity.

“If you both have a particular mutation and your genes mix up together, that keeps the mutation going. In small communities that will occur more and more; it’s why you don’t sleep with your cousins; it’s why the aristocracy were famously inbred and stupid.

“What you need is a broad spread of genetics. If you do a test and compare the difference where you and your partner are from, and the difference where your mother and father are from, it is interesting in terms of how much more genetically healthy your children will be than you are.”

There’s no scientific accounting, however, for the peculiar way the Irish mind works.

During Craic Dealer, Ó Briain sets up a ruse. He asks what people would say to get a burglar out of their house if they happened upon one.

Answers like “peek-a-boo”, “hands up” and the aping of a dog barking come back. Ó Briain says one answer that he gets from Irish audiences, but never from their counterparts in the UK, is, “I know your mother.”

* Dara Ó Briain’s Craic Dealer is released tomorrow, Nov 9. He performs at Vicar Street, Thursday, Nov 22-Saturday, Nov 24 and Wednesday, Nov 28-Saturday, Dec 1. Further information: www.vicarstreet.ie