Boys are back in town
The Hardy Bucks perform in Cork tonight and are also putting together a new series of their RTÉ show, writes
The Hardy Bucks are back. With season four of their cult RTÉ comedy series awaiting screening dates, the Mayo men are on tour with their live show, Soundfellas.
“Wait, let me figure out the sound-bite: it’s a blend of comedy and music. It’s extremely funny. God, I’m crap at this. It’s, umm, a blend of raw Mayo talent and human brutish power?”
Martin Maloney is struggling to describe the show, which sees his character, Eddie Durkan, take to the stage for 90 minutes with his fellow Bucks: Buzz, Frenchtoast O’Toole, The Boo and Salmon.
He says there are “more knob gags anywhere this side of American Pie 2. Also, Alex Jones is going to be
appearing, dressed as a reptilian on the back of an American eagle.”
Mention Alex Jones, the famously deranged host of right-wing US internet news show Infowars, and Maloney cracks up. “I call him the bullfrog of liberty,” he says. Jones’ bizarre, paranoid rants have become a memetic mine for satirical YouTube re-edits this past year.
"The results are surrealist comedy gold, a shining example of what online-platform comedy is all about: a vast, ever-evolving in-joke.
“You’ve got to watch ‘Alex Jones Keeps Interrupting His Guests.’ It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen,” Maloney says, before launching into a credible impression of Jones’ gravelly drawl: “Yeah you know Dr Pepper actually used to have cocaine in it? My family were involved in it, not in a bad way.”
YouTube is, of course, where Maloney et al’s TV series started a decade ago, with the core cast shooting their own DIY webisodes, largely penned by Maloney and Chris Tordoff, AKA The Viper, in Swinford, Co Mayo, before winning RTÉ’s public-vote Storylands competition in 2009.
The rest is history: three seasons of their popular RTÉ show to date, and the 2013 Hardy Bucks movie.
The show’s heavy-drinking, joint-smoking Mayo lads and their quest for cash in the claw proved recession-era social commentary that touched a nerve as well as a funny bone. Irish audiences and young émigrés saw in the characters an uneasy reflection of what life really was offering young people in rural Ireland.
“There’s always, believe it or not, a moral message underneath it,” Maloney says. “When you look at Mayo itself, you have towns that have been completely devastated.
"Corporate greed has been allowed to run free in the country, and it’s a real sad state of affairs when you look at how many people’s lives have been torn apart through emigration and unemployment.”
But nine years have now elapsed since they first captured the imagination of an Irish audience. Maloney’s life has changed; he lives in Stockholm with his wife and two young children, the eldest of whom is six.
Having children, Maloney, 34, says, means he’s been “forced into growing up; one was do-able, but two is intense.”
Correspondingly, the lives of the other actors have also progressed: “Buzz is doing a lot of online comedy. The Viper has his own solo comedy show and he works for Russia Today. Frenchtoast is becoming a surf
instructor in Bundoran. Salmon is pursuing an acting career, and The Boo is a personal assistant.”
Chris Tordoff (The Viper) and Owen Colgan (Buzz) have both kept up a solid personal presence online with YouTube views in the millions, but it might surprise fans that many of the talented cast don’t work
full-time in comedy film and TV.
Maloney says that’s reflective of the post-austerity arts landscape in Ireland.
Maloney himself unwittingly illustrated how quickly a Hardy Buck can become a hard-up Buck in 2013, when Irish newspapers reported with gleeful schadenfreude that the star had been granted free legal aid in a court case he later won against the bouncers of a Dublin nightclub, who had claimed he attacked them during a dispute while he was DJing at the club.
He filled out a statement of means revealing a weekly income of less than €250, the same year the Hardy Bucks movie was released to become an Irish box-office success.
“Yeah, that’s show business,” he sighs. “It’s a tough industry and we arrived into it in a time when there was still money, and that rapidly changed.
"A lot of people don’t understand: it’s such a small country and television and film has taken a hit. The internet has become the biggest rival to terrestrial television, there’s so much competition out there, and there just isn’t the finance.”
For Maloney, as for so many, it’s a matter of keeping a lot of balls in the air; he played the part of Vigred, henchman to Ivar The Boneless, in season six of History Channel’s ever-popular Vikings, a “baptism of fire” in his non-comedy acting career, he says.
He’s also a musician and has finished recording an EP, “five tracks of straight rock and roll,” that he plans to release this spring, and he has a new TV series he’s written that he’s hoping to fund.
Season three of the TV show, Hardy Bucks Rides Again, aired on the national broadcaster in 2015. Season four finished filming last year, and awaits a release date.
Any hints as to what fans can expect? Maloney’s playing his cards close to his chest, but he can reveal that viewers will be treated to a flashback to the Bucks as children.
Otherwise, he says, the challenge has been in progressing the storyline for the characters.
“It’s gone from being about men in their mid-20s to men in their mid-30s. The joke would go flat if it just stayed a bunch of guys smoking joints and going on the piss all the time. There’s other things, like tax returns and christenings and stuff.”
He’ll say no more, but we do know, from the minor scandal that erupted in the press last May during filming, that we can expect a cameo from Tommy Tiernan as a priest: Mayo County Council issued an apology to locals for giving permission to the crew to film at Toormore burial ground when visitors to the cemetery complained at the sight of Tiernan in a dog collar, presiding over a funeral scene complete with fake coffin.
In the meantime, being back out on the road with the live show is fun. “It’s a real pleasure, because you’re travelling around the country with some of the funniest people on the planet,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to it, and meeting the fans as well.”
Once side-effect of how much-loved their fictional characters are — fans call them by their show names on a near-constant basis — is that they’re expected to be every bit as up for the craic in real life as their characters are.
“The Boo commented on how sensible this tour has been in comparison to previous years,” Maloney says.
“I think we’re all getting a bit older now. If we were constantly on the session, we’d be checking ourselves into rehab after a week. But we have a few pints, like. You have to do that.”
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