All change for Allan Havey as he takes to the comedy stage

From stand-up comedy to the set of Mad Men and back again, Allan Havey has shared stages with the biggest names in showbusiness, says Richard Fitzpatrick.

How times have changed. The American comedian and actor Allan Havey, who’s familiar to television audiences for his memorable run in the TV series Mad Men, did a stand-up routine while guesting on the Late Show with David Letterman a few years ago about the way kids nowadays are mollycoddled compared to his day growing up in Miami in the 1960s.

“My sister’s worried about her kids self-esteem,” he says.

“They’re kids — three and four years old. She goes into their room late at night, turns the lights down low, and reads them self-esteem books:

The Bunny That Wouldn’t Quit; The Bear That Could Do It. My dad would come into my room with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, holding a highball and scare the hell out of us.

“He’d read us Hansel and Gretel. Do you remember those freaks? Hansel and Gretel lived at home with their dad and their stepmom. The stepmom said, ‘Hey, we don’t have enough food. Take these kids out in the woods. Lose ‘em.’ The kids drop breadcrumbs; find their way home. The stepmom says: ‘No. Deeper. Further. Lose the kids.’

“The kids are lost. They’re crying. They’re hungry. They come across a house made of candy. Yum, yum. Lick, lick. No, no. Witch lives inside. Grabs the kids, sticks them in a cage. She’s gonna eat ’em. This is two minutes into the story. The kids get out of the cage.

Shove the old witch into an oven. Burn her to death, and run home,” he says, concluding by triumphantly blowing smoke from an imaginary cigarette, guzzling from his scotch-and-soda drink, and adding: “Sleep tight!”

Havey has been a staple of New York scene since landing in the city out of theatre school 40 years ago, just as the dawn was setting on the days of disco.

“During the early 1980s there was a comedy boom, those first years of Saturday Night Live. It was just starting to take off. Club managers were closing down discos and opening up comedy clubs. Many a time, you’d be on stage and you’d look up and you’d see a disco ball.”

Over the next couple of decades Havey shared a back stage with the great comedians of the age, including Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, and for three years from 1989 to 1992 he hosted a cult classic, three-hour late night TV chat show on HBO’s The Comedy Channel called Night After Night.

Louis CK — who had Havey on his award winning show Louie many years later playing himself — also emerged from that New York comedy circuit in the 1990s, but is in limbo at present following accusations of sexual misconduct.

“I remember Louis when he was a young comic coming up,” says Havey.

“He was always very fond of his comedy, and a good guy. It was just a gas to be on the show with him. He’s very smart. He knows what he wants, and he loves to work with comedians. Hopefully he’ll be back very soon.”

Havey — who has a long film and television acting CV, including appearances on Steven Soderberg’s The Informant!; the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!; and Judd Apatow’s Love series on Netflix — was in his element pottering around the set of Mad Men, as he got to soak up the perfectionism of the show’s creator Matthew Weiner, who was famous for his attention to detail in re-creating the social life of middle class Americans in the 1960s.

“When I first walked on the set, I had a flashback, and of course from watching the show,” he says.

“There was one time between shooting and I would wander and sit in different offices and just of look at the books on the shelves and the artefacts on the desks. There was nothing that didn’t belong there or that I couldn’t remember as a kid growing up.

“At one point I went to a desk and I pulled out a stack of paper. I pulled out a piece in the middle, and it was a typewritten memo. It wasn’t just there as a prop. I didn’t find anything on that set that was out of place or phoney.”

Weiner and his team of writers were ingenious, too, for their ability to capture forgotten social norms like, say, the way a neighbour had licence to hit a misbehaving child or the scene where Don and his first wife Betty finish up a family picnic in the park by shaking the debris off their rug onto the grass and heading back to their car.

“I remember the picnic scene, and, you know, that’s what people did back then,” he says.

“Several times I was slapped by a friend of my father’s if I got out of line. He didn’t think twice about it. The scene where little Sally had the plastic bag on her head — she was playing spaceman with her friends and she put a plastic bag over her head.

Her mother scolded her: ‘My dress is on the floor!’ She didn’t care about the health of her child. She was worried she was going to wrinkle her dress.”

Havey played the role of Lou Avery; a deeply uncool middle manager that gets hired as creative director at Don Draper’s advertising agency midway through the series after Don is suspended.

He’s the guy with the cardigans and the thwarted dreams of being a cartoonist, a humourless, hard-ass middle manager type.

The fact that he’s a good family man — unlike Don, of course — and from a different, by-the-book generation gets lost a bit as audiences rush to hate him.

“Lou was not cool at all,” says Havey.

“He was voted somewhere ‘the most hated man on television’. It’s so nice when people are passionate so I know I was doing my job. If you think about it, though, Lou was just an old-fashioned professional. He didn’t smoke.

He didn’t get drunk. He didn’t play around on his wife. He was just interested in the job, and probably one of the old-fashioned guys on the way out when he got that job.

“If you’re watching the show and you like Don Draper even though he’s an anti-hero, and this guy comes along and just upsets everybody — I think that’s where the hate came from.

"Especially from me — I watched the show and I didn’t like him. Lou probably came up, went through the Depression, fought in the war, and now he’s around with all these spoiled, rotten kids with beards and long hair and they’re protesting Vietnam, and he’s just not buying any of that.”

Allan Havey performs on Friday, August 31, and Saturday, September 1, at City Limits Comedy Club, Cork.