Irish comedian David O’Doherty didn’t mean to nearly kill a Melbourne fan a few years ago

IRISH comedian David O’Doherty pines for the good ol’ days of nine months ago when everyone was angry about Pokemon Go, discovers Mikey Cahill.

D’OD, you’ve called this show Big Time and declared in your blurb: “It has been a tough year for humanity, but I’m going to fix everything.”

The world I said I was going to fix was very different and much simpler when I wrote the blurb for the show. Now it seems like it will collapse. Give me a week when I get to Australia and I will have come up with some solid, solid proposals. I think a way to solve the political problems of Australia is everyone needs to vote for Tom Ballard, he’ll fix Australia.

You’ll also get your fix of a certain underrated local dessert snack …

Everyone goes on about coffee and Tim Tams but the actual greatest thing is the double milky ice cream bar. The great uncelebrated Australian thing is ... the Weis Bar. Sometimes you have to go for a bit of a stroll because they’re hard to find. I imagine Mr Weis and his wife hand-make every one of them.

And what’s your guilty pleasure while you’re here?

I’ve done the MCG tour four times now. It was embarrassing last time when the tour guide said ‘I’ve taken you on this tour twice already’. It’s like the same super-fan at a gig three nights in a row. I can’t get enough of the 1956 Olympics in particular and reading about that kind of brutalism where they just smashed in a bunch of Melbourne’s finest buildings and replaced them with rubbish pieces of cement. Didn’t Swanston St have the longest unbroken shop frontage in the world? They were like ‘Nah nah nah, this is gonna look weird for the Swedish athletes coming over so let’s bulldoze the s*** out of this Victorian and Georgian heritage.

Irish comedian David O’Doherty pines for the anger associated with Pokemon Go.

You were nominated for a Barry Award last year at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for We Are All In the Gutter, But Some Of Us Are Looking At David O’Doherty. Tell us about this year’s show, Big Time.

I’ve got a song in the show which pertains to Melbourne. I was coming back from morning radio a couple of years ago and I was jet-lagged. There was a situation where there was a 16-year-old kid sitting on the path in rush hour on Swanston St and the car was moving slowly along and you could tell something was up with her. I thought that we should stop, because I was jet-lagged and time was running quite slowly so I said to the taxi-man, ‘Stop the car, I have to see if that woman is OK.’ He pulled in and I chucked open the passenger door and a cyclist was coming on the inside and I absolutely f***ing doored her.

No.

Yes. I’m a cyclist and I know you’re always supposed to open a car door with the inside arm … and I didn’t and a girl called Jessie was coming up on the inside and I basically beheaded her. At first I thought she was dead. She was lying on the ground and I go ‘Oh my god, I am so sorry.’

David O'Doherty performing on stage.

Cripes.

She reacted with this glorious Aussie fury and very coarse language and then she, in her third sentence says (bitter voice) ‘F*** you, I was at your f***ing show last night!’ I’m very self-aware of the level of fame I have around the world and I know in a city with three million people that the chances I have of meeting one person who was at the show is quite incredible. So I’ve written her a song that’s in Big Time. It’s quite a moving, slow ballad.

What happened to the sad girl?

She just disappeared, she must have seen us and thought, ‘My day is bad enough without being around these f***ing losers’. I tried to explain that to Jessie but Jessie was pretty sure she didn’t exist. There’ll be a Gala night in Melbourne where Jessie will come along. I actually became Facebook friends with her. Modern communication has stolen the thunder a little bit. Of course, one of the first times I did the song a girl in the audience said ‘I know Jessie, she told me about that!’ My dream is to record it with Van Dyke Parks and add a beautiful string arrangement.

Last year you toured with Flight Of the Conchords and Demetri Martin across the United States …

Me and the Conchords toured around the UK in 2004 and let’s never forget, we did Reading Town Hall, the nightmare gig. It’s always bad in comedy where the organisers go ‘Oh, we’ve put out tables’, which means they didn’t sell enough seats. The real nightmare is when they go ‘We’ve just put a few chairs in the lobby’. We played in the lobby of Reading Town Hall to eight people.

That must have been humiliating.

Then last year we played in Denver at Red Rocks to 16,000 (laughs wickedly). It’s been 12 years but we’re all pretty much the same, I’m playing a stupid melody keyboard and they’re still doing ludicrous songs. Somehow the world caught up and got on our vibe. It’s not like we’re young men experiencing this success, we find it as hilarious as anyone when we’re in Atlanta and a man with a top hat comes up to our green room to tell us ‘A cake has been left at reception’ from whichever famous cake-maker of Atlanta and it’s got a picture of a Rhinoceros and a Hippopotamus on it because they love the song

Their lyrics are bottomless.

It was us playing these huge stadiums then doing incredible mundane things during the day like hiring bikes and going to see museums and things like that. The ridiculousness wasn’t lost on us. I played in Flight Of the Conchords show in 2003 at Vic’s Bar in Melbourne and over the course of the festival it went from being nothing to really something. Their TV program is eight years old now and it shows if you make a nice show that people genuinely take to heart you can go back on the road and people will come and see you.

Remarkable longevity. Just like a guy playing a toy keyboard.

Think of the million bands that have come and gone in the interim when Flight Of the Conchords took time off to do other projects. All these people turn up at their shows, some of them dressed as robots, coming to arenas. Big Bang Theory is fine but I don’t think anyone is going to miss it if it stops tomorrow. Conchords only ran for 20-something episodes but people took it to their heart and connected with their comedy.

Don’t wanna be a buzzkill, but let’s talk Trump and Brexit, the tragicomic themes of now …

I wanted to write a silly show with loads of silly jokes in it, I’ve been watching loads of Mitch Hedberg lately and I wanted to do a silly show but the rise of fascism got in the way of that.

David O'Doherty wanted to write a silly show with loads of silly jokes in it.

Will Brexit affect you?

From a purely selfish point of view, when they repeal Article 50 I’ll have to get a Visa to work in the UK. The Left and Right in the UK are becoming more polarised. It was muddy for a long time, like two sides of the same piece of ham. Brexit is a very strange thing, especially for Northern Ireland. A lot of my non-white friends, like Nish Kumar, who is from Croydon was told ‘Go home!’ even though his parents moved here a long time ago.

That escalated quickly …

I look out the window and everyone is crying and on fire. It’s hard not to long for the good ol’ days of nine months ago when people we’re just really angry at Pokemon Go.

SEE Big Time, Forum Upstairs, 154 Flinders St, city. Mar 30-April 23, $39.70 comedyfestival.com.au