‘You couldn’t ignore that madness’: The comedians turning the GAA into a laughing matter

Long before D’Unbelievables and the roles on stage and screen that made them famous, Pat Shortt and Jon Kenny were a pair of jobbing musicians on the pub circuit in Limerick. One night their arms were twisted to perform at a medal presentation for a juvenile team in a village lounge, where, in the spirit of the GAA, they were treated as indentured volunteers.Shortt played accordion, Kenny played guitar and for the guts of two hours they parlayed a short repertoire into a lively dance floor. It was nearly midnight when the master of ceremonies took the microphone from Kenny, just as they were running out of gas.“He’s dead since and I shouldn’t mention any names,” says Shortt, “but he was a big, huge man, big hands on him and a soft hat and cursing – the language out of him was shocking. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘will the f***ing women get the f***ing sandwiches and put them up on the counter and we’ll line up the under-16s for their medals and the band are going to play for another two hours.“And we were looking at each other, ‘what to f**k’. There’d be no money involved or nothing. The crowd didn’t give a damn because there was dancing and sandwiches and pints. But you couldn’t ignore that as a comedian, that madness in the GAA. That’s what I’d call it, madness – which had nothing to do with the sport, just the people around it.”READ MOREThe character they encountered that night was the inspiration for Timmy Ryan, the salty caricature in the famous dressingroom sketch that launched D’Unbelievables to a national audience, more than 30 years ago. Timmy’s foaming pre-match speech was full of deathless one-liners (“Let every blow be a funeral”, “Hit him hard, he’s no relation”.)In the early 1990s, GAA comedy was a niche genre that harvested its material from a short spectrum of themes. Under comic licence, hurling was often portrayed as lawless and that had a self-referential quality.Dermot Morgan appeared on the Mike Murphy Show in 1983 dressed in a suit but wielding a hurley as a weapon. His glamorous assistant was a mannequin decked out in a tracksuit and a hurling helmet and Morgan used this prop to demonstrate an array of vicious strokes. The accompanying lines were clever and topical, but its characterisation of hurling was a well-worn trope.Around that time, and for many years, Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh’s radio commentaries generated a thriving trade in comic riffs. Distinctive voices are always open to impersonation and Ó Muircheartaigh’s uniquely lyrical style lubricated other imaginations. But as a gag it only had one note.For a long time, GAA comedy was narrow and, in many respects, predictable but that is no longer true. Over the last 15 or 20 years, GAA comedy has developed layers and it has grown an edge. New comedians saw an opening.Rory O’Connor, of Rory’s Stories, with his son Zach at home. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times “The penny dropped with me that nobody had really done comedy in the GAA properly,” says Rory O’Connor of Rory’s Stories. “So, I dived into that in 2014 and started to do sketches on all the characters of the GAA.“I did an endless amount of dirty corner back [sketches] and cocky forward and the lad who’s always injured – just based on everyone from my own club or my own experience. It just took off and it was the foundation of Rory’s Stories. On the Facebook page I had 100,000 likes in a few weeks and it just blew up.”What emerged was a wave of comedians who took a different view. Bernard Casey started doing stand-up in 2011, a couple of years after he had won an All-Ireland junior football title with Skellig Rangers. Much like O’Connor, he recognised the humour that was under his nose, intrinsic to every dressingroom.“I understand it,” Casey says, “I get it. I understand the language and the characters and the unwritten rules of the GAA. You didn’t want to go down the route of the stereotypical cliches either – people were kind of sick of that. Many others go down that route and that’s fine. I wanted to go down the untold side and the niche side of the GAA – the hopeless character and develop an actual character around it.”On Thursday, Casey launched a new book, Local Gossip: Tall Tales and Short Stories from Over the Road. Two stories in it are devoted to Casey’s best-known character, Nephew, whose existence is defined by a hopeless dream.“A lot of people concentrate their humour on the fella that made it,” he says. “Mine is always about the fella that never made it and never was going to make it. I kind of look at the tragic humour in it. Nephew is a big character and Nephew’s whole identity is trying to make the Kerry minors.“To everybody else except him he has no hope. But he goes to extreme lengths to enhance his chances of even having a trial. Nephew is talking to a documentary crew who are documenting his progress on making the minors and even the documentary crew are questioning – ‘hang on a second, this lad isn’t going to make it at all’.”Casey and O’Connor made their breakthrough on various internet platforms, but on a parallel track, GAA comedy established a residency elsewhere. Mario Rosenstock’s Gift Grub on The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show had been a staple of comedy consumption for nearly a decade before he was seduced by the GAA’s comic potential. Davy Fitzgerald was his gateway muse.“When he started managing teams (with Waterford in 2008), that completely caught my eye,” says Rosenstock. “He basically turned out to be a hurling Jose Mourinho. What I mean by that is he comes into your county and says, ‘Lads, you’re f***ed, but I can make ye great again’.“The latest news about Davy is that he’s taking a year out [from management] so I’m currently looking at a sketch [for his new stage show Boom] about what he’s going to do. So, I’m going to have him go hell for leather on the Camino.” ”I need to chill out,” Rosenstock shouts in his familiar Davy Fitz squeak. “Chill the f**k out.”When Sky Sports were awarded a contract to broadcast GAA matches in 2014 Rosenstock dreamed up an ingenious parody of their Soccer Saturday programme, with Jeff Stelling, Paul Merson and Chris Kamara short circuited by their first exposure to hurling. The clip reached an audience of “millions and millions all over the world”, says Rosenstock. “For a fool like me, when you give me any bit of success, you’re just encouraging me. So, I said, ‘right, I’m going to do GAA’.”Mario Rosenstock's impersonation of Davy Fitzgerald is infused with high-voltage energy For years, Gift Grub had a Monday morning GAA news slot delivered in the voice of Morgan Freeman, in the smoky style of his Shawshank Redemption voiceover. Apart from Davy Fitz, though, Rosenstock’s richest crossover character was Marty Morrissey. In the history of GAA comedy, the RTÉ commentator was the first to be portrayed as a lothario.“I just played up that ironic thing that he’s a ladies’ man,” says Rosenstock. “It’s irony. Everyone knows that he’s not a stud, but girls still go up to him for selfies because he’s a celebrity and he’s nice and he’s funny and he’s friendly. But then that backs up the idea that he could potentially be a stud. I just played that up and made him a sex machine.“In one of my live shows that ran for a whole year I had him turn up as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. I was basically just thrusting everywhere and ladies were falling out of me and all this sort of stuff.”In a busier market, comedians who wanted to peddle GAA material needed to hustle for their audience. O’Connor said he did impressions of The Sunday Game pundits for about three months until Conor Moore came along. “I said, ‘right, I’m not competing with him,” says O’Connor. “Stay in your lane.” For the first time, GAA comedy was a competitive space.Cornelius Patrick O’Sullivan started doing stuff during the pandemic. He had been running a comedy club in Cork since 2010 without invading the pitch. But he had been immersed in the GAA all his life and coming home from a match one day, he was told a story of a journeyman coach who had pulled out of a club job and accepted another one a day later because the money was irresistible. The dialogue for a sketch appeared in his head.“No, I can’t do it, absolutely no way, she’ll kill me, she’ll absolutely kill me … How much? How much? Do you know what, we’ll f***ing beat them this year.”“That was the first sketch,” he says, “and once it took off you get the dopamine hit from the adulation, the likes and the shares and the comments and I was like, ‘Jesus, I didn’t realise there was that much appetite for it’.”Over the last couple of years, vlogging became one of O’Sullivan’s points of difference. In comedy terms, it was the equivalent of foraging: the material was there in the wild. He would turn up to a club match of no particular significance and film a couple of hundred clips, edit them down and add a humorous commentary.“It took off like you’d never believe,” he says. “I’ve over 100 of them done now.”For about the last year he has been touring his show Pull Hard, “which is about my son, who is autistic, and it’s about hurling, and how they mesh together”. It is a comedy, but it has layers and it is designed to prompt responses other than laughter.“I have had grown men come up to me, who I know in my heart and soul would never have darkened the door of a comedy club and they go, ‘Jesus, that was brilliant, I really needed that’. Men are very slow to let themselves be vulnerable and I think when you’re laughing you are kind of making yourself a bit vulnerable.”Pat Shortt and Faye Shortt tapping into the funny idiosyncrasies of TV presenters Shortt is appearing in The Abbey just now, but he will soon be on the road again with Shortt Stories, his stage show alongside his daughter Faye. In it, they have a sketch that was written about a year before Mary McAleese walked away from the integration project, but which would have been true at any time in the history of the GAA. Shortt’s character is a direct descendant of Timmy Ryan.“Faye comes out in a dress, all done up, and I’m telling her, ‘Stand over there’, and I’m telling her what to do. I’m bringing her on to talk about the importance of women in the GAA but every time she is about to speak, I go, ‘And another thing I want to say – sorry now Mary for holding you up’, and I go on a tirade and she makes three attempts to come up to the microphone until eventually we run out of time and she says nothing.”Some of the best comedy is not a laughing matter. The GAA was full of that stuff too.