Man With The Mirror
Honoured at the PPI Radio Awards, cracking up the nation nightly on TV3 and ready to bring Gift Grub to the stage once again, ‘The Other Special One’ talks to Craig Fitzpatrick about satire, nights out with Vincent Browne and his distaste for double entendres.
Craig Fitzpatrick, 14 Nov 2011
“Bear Grylls going to Oxegen. Mature Gary Barlow. Lord Henry Mountcharles. Mary Lou McDonald. Mary Byrne. Constantine Gurdgiev…” The king of Irish satire sits with a cuppa in Brooks Hotel scanning his phone and reading aloud. Rather than boasting about who he has on speed dial, he’s reciting from the list of ideas he keeps, new names and concepts ripe for parody. “Mick Wallace and Ming Flanagan are two characters I’ve enjoyed doing this year. When you hear them on radio, you can almost see them. Immediately you can see Wallace’s pink shirt and the Joey Tempest hair. Gay Mitchell? It’s like the guy who starts a sentence with, ‘With all due respect’. He disclaims everything: ‘This might sound a bit odd, but what about Dublin for the Olympics? Stay with me on this one but… what about the Queen as titular monarch of a 32-county Ireland?’” At this point, Mario Rosenstock drops the perfectly pitched impression and acts out the part of someone whose head is exploding with disbelief. Jammed as it is with whole armies of beleaguered celebrity send-ups, you fear his brain could actually surpass capacity and burst messily over the couch.
Hopefully he holds out long enough to spill all that contained comedy from the Olympia stage this November. Gift Grub Live 2 follows on from a hugely successful live jaunt two years ago that gathered up sketches from The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show and took them around the country. Mario and his friend Ian enjoyed it so much they just had to do it all over again. It’s a homecoming of sorts for the theatrically-inclined comic. “Yeah, it does feel like that,” he nods. “I started off primarily as an actor on stage. You’d feel this tension from the audience and you’d really feed off that. Then I started doing comedic plays and you’d hear the laughter coming back. It was like a shot of adrenaline into your arm. You’d start becoming addicted to this buzz. Coming back to the stage with Gift Grub brought that back completely. You know that feeling you get when you go back to a room you haven’t been to in years and you get the same smell? It’s that thing.”
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