McSavage's unique brand and blend of repartee, ribaldry and rhythm has seen him described as among the brightest new stars to emerge onto the comedy circuit in recent years.
A unique talent, David McSavage honed his craft on the streets of Europe as a street performer over many years and worked the comedy circuit as far a field as Australia and Scandinavia. Returning to Dublin three years ago, McSavage quickly established himself on the Dublin comedy circuit performing at venues like the International Bar, the Ha'penny Inn, and Galway's Cuba. Discovered by Pat Kenny doing the warm up for the 'Late Late Show' he went on to make a record four personal appearances on the show. He now sells out several nights at the renowned 'Vicar Street' venue.
McSavage's improv shows a fast and profound wit. He treads the line between madness and genius with aplomb. He is a genuinely gifted comedian
"Best Newcomer Award"
Hot Press 2003
"One of Irelands funniest comedians"
The Irish Mirror
"Funniest experience within 1000 km of Sydney"
Sydney Morning Herald
"The comic equivelant of dynamite fishing"
Fest (Official Edinburgh Fringe Magazine)
"McSavage is fearless, it's incredible"
Tommy Tiernan
Management
Pete Briquette Tel. 07753 676 960. Email pbriquette@hotmail.com
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Sunday, March 16, 2008 - By Andrew Lynch
A scion of one of Ireland’s political dynasties, David McSavage’s brand of unflinching and politically incorrect comedy proves that the acorn occasionally falls very far from the tree.
David McSavage is having a laugh. ‘‘Take a look at this,” he urges, flipping open his laptop and inserting a DVD. It turns out to be a no-frills - and, presumably, highly illegal - self-defence guide, in which a burly bouncer with a thick Mayo accent demonstrates the most efficient way of punching your enemy’s lights out.
‘‘I love this sort of stuff, because it’s so Irish,” enthuses the man who has firmly established himself as the most controversial and confrontational comic in the country. ‘‘It’s like that programme Winning Streak - it just holds up a mirror to the nation. That’s what we are, a bunch of country folk with ham sandwiches in our pockets, waving banners and shouting, ‘G’wan there Micky Joe, ya boy ya!’ It’s much more honest than the IFTAs, a bunch of pathetic television non-entities trying to pretend they’re Hollywood A-listers.”
If all this sounds a little patronising, McSavage insists it’s not meant to be. The 42-year-old describes himself as quintessentially Irish - he resents other people’s success, he’s opposed to all forms of authority and for years he dealt with his insecurities by drowning them in alcohol (he insists that he’s off the drink these days).Even his adopted name, he explains, was away of getting in touch with his inner muck savage.
‘‘People say it’s dangerous to burn bridges,” he muses. ‘‘But I’ve always found that I only have to stand next to a bridge and it spontaneously combusts. Maybe that’s why a lot of people don’t seem to like me.” This, it must be said, is putting it mildly. Within the notoriously incestuous Irish comedy circuit, the impulsive and erratic McSavage is regarded with a mixture of wary admiration and hostility. Among the many colourful pieces of material about him on the net is a clip of a phone message in which he wildly berates a Dublin club owner for banning him from the premises.
At his best, McSavage is a genuinely gifted comedian, but the fact remains that he does have an unfortunate habit of alienating a sizeable portion of his audience. This journalist has seen him reduce whole rooms to tears of helpless laughter, as well as offend people so badly that they simply get up and leave.
‘‘Why would you bring a date to a comedy gig?” he asked one bemused punter recently. ‘‘Because laughter releases the same chemicals in the human brain as arousal and orgasm. So, I’m basically turning your girlfriend on. I’m not suggesting you can’t make her laugh - you just can’t do it for as long as I can.”
He tells hecklers in wheelchairs: ‘‘You’re pretty funny, but you’ll never be a stand-up comedian.’’ Another favourite line is: ‘‘You say rape, I say surprise!” This tends to provoke either guilty hysterics or disgusted jeers, depending on the audience.
In person, McSavage is equally unpredictable, his conversation veering between arrogant flippancy and thoughtful self-analysis peppered with hilariously crude asides. If you can get him to sit still long enough, it becomes clear there’s an intelligent, decent and painfully honest man struggling to get out. But you do have to navigate an awful lot of neuroses along the way.
‘‘The way I look at it is that these thoughts are in my head and it would be disrespectful not to articulate them,” he says. ‘‘Contrary to what some people seem to believe, I don’t want anyone to think I’m an asshole. I’ve had horrible nights when I’ve died on my arse because I said something I shouldn’t.
‘‘But, to me, the whole point of comedy is to see how far you can push something before you cross the line. Unless you can give it that little bit of revolutionary attitude, there’s no point in doing it - you might as well go off and become a property developer instead. I suppose I’ve always had a problem with following the rules.”
Given McSavage’s relatively privileged background, breaking the rules must have taken some nerve. Both his father, David, and his uncle, Niall Andrews, were Fianna Fail TDs. His grandfather Todd was one of the state’s founding fathers; an IRA volunteer who established Bord na Mona and served as chairman of CIE. Growing up in Dublin’s Blackrock, David Jr felt as if he was being prepared to follow in their footsteps - a role for which he realised he was spectacularly ill-suited.
‘‘I have a lot of respect for my dad, but, like a lot of Irish men, he was quite repressed,” says McSavage. ‘‘I always say that I do comedy because I didn’t get enough affection as a child. I need the validation that comes from the love of strangers.”
It rapidly became clear that David Jr was not cut out for a political career when he covered a dog in Fianna Fail stickers during his first election canvass in Dun Laoghaire. At school in the exclusive Clongowes, he refused tostudy and failed his Leaving Cert. A letter from one of his teachers, which he once had framed on his wall, read: ‘‘Dear Mr and Mrs Andrews, I regret to inform you that your son David was seen today on the dual-carriageway waving at cars and smoking a cigar when he should have been at PE.”
‘‘I just didn’t fit in,” he shrugs. ‘‘I think my father wanted me to be this Richard Harris character, good at rugby as well as exams. But, instead, he got this little pervert who just wanted to play the guitar. I felt completely repressed in Ireland; I had this horrible paranoia that people were constantly disapproving of me because of who my father was. So I had to get as far away as possible.”
By his early 20s, he had comfortably earned his reputation as the black sheep of the family, an underachieving wastrel who found it impossible to hold down a job. He emigrated and travelled widely in Europe, the US and Asia, working as a waiter (‘‘I got fired for pulling a knife on my boss, but I’m pretty sure I was joking’’), a labourer and helping to build a food kitchen in Peru, before he contracted dysentery and had to leave the country.
Eventually, he wound up teaching English and busking in Tokyo, where a few days of belting out Bob Dylan and Beatles songs in an underground station finally led him to his true calling in life.
‘‘The first time I busked,” he remembers, ‘‘it was Golden Week in Japan, the biggest holiday period of the year. I made a fortune. That was when I suddenly realised I didn’t actually have to have a job. All these rules that are drilled into you as a kid - you’re not legally obliged to follow them. You have much more freedom than you think.”
Since then, McSavage has eked out his living as a street performer, honing a freewheeling act that involves composing songs about passers-by, heckling the crowd and fending off the occasional threat of violence. He has been beaten up by Boyzone minders, spent a night in the Pearse Street Garda cells for illegal trading, and appeared before the courts on obscenity and vagrancy charges. He can still be found playing his regular pitch in Temple Bar most weekends, where he says the gardai have got fed up with arresting him and instead leave him to take his chances with the punters.
‘‘I saw a father walking by with his daughter the other day and I stupidly asked if she wasn’t a bit young for him,” he recalls ruefully. ‘‘He just went for me, fists flailing. Usually things go well, but sometimes it does get a bit too much like Jerry Springer for comfort.
‘‘In Dublin, you get these kids in tracksuits with bits of hair buttered down on their heads, who have never had any love in their lives. They’re basically little warriors. When they see people happy it makes them upset, so they want to get me. I try to disarm them by saying nice things or singing All You Need is Love, but it doesn’t always work out.”
This aggression, says McSavage, is just one of the many things he’s come to dislike about his home town. He deplores the slagging culture in Irish schools, which he thinks damaged him as a child and is now affecting his Polish-born younger son (he has two with his wife, Hannah).
He hates the ugliness of the Liffey, the popularity of Des Bishop and the inability of Irish people to express sexual desire when they’re sober. (‘‘People talk about drinking like it’s some kind of heroic endeavour, but babies are drinking from a breast from the very second they’re born and they don’t go around boasting about it.”) Above all, however, he hates the national obsession with property, which he says leaves him completely alienated.
‘‘They think they’re so shrewd, these entrepreneurial wheeler-dealers collecting rent from 100 Chinese people in a room in Ranelagh. Interesting to think that, ten years from now, one of those Chinese people will be renting that same room out to their smack-addicted teenage daughter who they neglected when she was a child, because they were so consumed with making money and snorting coke off the backsides of rent boys who aren’t much older than the kids being collected by his sexually frustrated wife.”
Like many rebels, however, McSavage seems to be more than a little in love with what he’s rebelling against. He says that he sometimes looks at conventional couples on the street and wonders if he’d be happier if he’d taken a more traditional route through life. In his weaker moments, he even admits that he’d like to buy a house.
The stepping stone might be his own television series, which he has openly craved for several years but has never quite managed to get beyond the pilot stages. His latest project is Headwreckers, a Larry Sanders-style spoof reality programme about real-life comedians trying to write a sketch show. He is optimistic it will be shown on Channel 4 later this year, asserting it certainly won’t be on RTE, ‘‘because it’s actually funny’’.
For several years, McSavage was the resident warm-up artist for the Late Late Show, where he got to hang out and swap experiences with some famous comedians. He admits that it’s left him with some grave reservations about his chosen profession. Having chosen his course, however, he’s adamant that there can be no turning back.
‘‘There’s an immense well of melancholia underlying most comedy,” he says soberly. ‘‘You go on stage and talk about these incredibly painful things, because there’s a constant need to keep the audience laughing. When it’s going well it’s amazing, but even then, it’s purely of the moment and you can never get it back. That’s a big problem.
‘‘So, that’s why I really want to do the television show, to create something permanent that I could leave behind as a legacy. That would mean a lot tome.”
David McSavage plays the Ruby Room as part of the Galway Comedy Festival on March 22
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