The Moore the merrier – Conor's home show promises inside jokes
Thomas Lyons
In sporting terms Ireland is a nation that consistently punches above its weight. Our abiding love for competitive sports means we have a batch of readily identifiable elite level Irish athletes.
Among them is a Mullingar Shamrocks player who missed out on a county medal almost 10 years ago. In a similar fashion to a cuckoo chick, the comedian, impressionist and Mullingar export Conor Moore has placed himself among sporting luminaries like Rory McIlroy and Roy Keane.
“I suppose I have the Westmeath Examiner and The Topic to thank,” he says of his entry into his chosen field. “When Shamrocks played The Downs in Cusack Park in 2016 in the championship, The Downs beat us. There was a bit of a row at the end of the match, nothing serious, but a lot of pushing and shoving anyway.
“There was a photograph of me in the paper. It was a not-so-flattering picture. All my mates were sending it to me.
“It didn’t look too good, but genuinely it was very harmless stuff. I waited for a couple of days, to hear back if I was in trouble with the county board or anything. And then nothing came of it.”
With that pressure off, Conor did what he does best, he had a laugh at it: “I did a video on Snapchat, sent it in to the lads, taking the mick out of the row. Doing Mourinho, talking about how special it was, doing Dunphy, saying it was a disgrace. I was doing Brolly, saying ‘forget about them, they’re men’, and that kind of stuff.”
The response to the mimicry was instant: “Dennis Corroon got the video and put it up on his Facebook page. It got a huge reaction. That inspired me. Within a week or two, I’d quit my job and I started making videos.”
It sounds immediate, but in a way it was the culmination of years of being a messer: “When I was a kid, I did impressions a good bit. I was a big fan of Après Match. When I was in school, I would do them for one mate, Alan Cashman.
Continued on page 2
“He was the only one that actually enjoyed my impressions when I was growing up. To this day, he gives me a hand writing stuff. He’s got a good ear and eye for comedy.
“Here we are bloody 25 years later, me and him sitting in his house chatting away about sketches and impressions. It’s kind of funny how it’s worked out, I’m still doing the impressions for the same fella 25 years later.”
From those origins, he has built a successful career. A perusal of his tour schedule shows a list of sold-out appearances; places like Cork Opera House, Town Hall Galway, Glór Theatre in Ennis, along with gigs in high profile venues like INEC Killarney and the Olympia Theatre in Dublin.
The demand for tickets to the Mullingar Park Hotel on October 17 and 25, and Athlone’s Dean Crow on August 30, was such that extra dates were added for both venues.
Conor’s transformation of “being a messer” into a career was a job requiring a considerable amount of work: “A lot of people don’t think of that when they look at a 30-second clip.
“There’s that old cliché, if you stand still, you’re going to be left behind. This is my Monday to Friday, and I try to keep it the same as everybody else’s. I work for myself, but I work eight to five every day on impressions and writing.”
Continuing to deliver on the success of his early career is another pressure: “Sometimes I think, how can I make anything any funnier? Have I thought of all the ideas I’m going to think of? Then something happens in the news or a new character comes along. It’s all about working at it and not standing still.”
In an unconventional business what constitutes work is different to the norm: “It’s reading the papers, looking at the news, watching and listening to podcasts, watching highlights. This is where the ideas come from. Also studying comedy. Sometimes I’ll watch different comedians, see how they make people laugh. There’s a good bit of work that goes into it that you wouldn’t see.”
The role of mimic requires an ability to view the world from a different perspective. For many Irish people, President Donald Trump is perceived as a bête noire. There were not many from this neck of the woods pleased to see him return to the oval office.
“It’s funny, I was actually delighted to see him get back in,” Conor laughs. “I did him at a gig that week in Dublin, a lunchtime gig. I think he was the third impression, but it killed the room, like it was just a complete flatline. And I was thinking, ‘this stuff is good’.
“The following week I did it again and they were laughing at it. I think the first audience thought it was a bit too soon.”
That experience may have been a lesson illustrating the truth in the adage: comedy is tragedy plus time. Identifying what is funny and when it is funny is part of the game: “We should be able to laugh at everything and everybody, just have the crack. That’s a philosophy I definitely live by. Don’t get me wrong, someone may do something, and you know you can’t do them any more. But for the most part, I just like to bring out the funny side of everything.”
Having made this his job since 2016 Conor has picked up a few tricks along the way: “Some of it is intuition. Some of it is experience. I’d look back at the first couple of gigs I did when I started out. My first real gig went grand. I did that in Columbia in Mullingar, all my friends came to it. It was easy to make them laugh.
“Then I had two horror shows after that, after-dinner appearances. At one somebody threw ice at me.
“An early gig was for the Dublin team, that was awful as well. My videos were going viral, so I started getting asked to do all these gigs around the place. I just said yes, not knowing what I was doing.”
Confidence is a major part of stagecraft. Conor’s online popularity can only have bolstered that assurance. The web, however, is a hungry beast. It requires consistent feeding to remain popular.
“That’s the hard thing about doing comedy, you have to keep it fresh. You have to keep surprising people. A musician can play the same song over and over again and people will love it every time they hear it, but I can’t do the same jokes over and over again. I have to keep changing my characters, because you’re trying to get a spontaneous laugh,” he said.
From his shaky start, the Mullingar man has created a show that is a real audience pleaser: “My live shows have been developing over the years. I have confidence in it now.”
Creating a specific stage show that can be presented in different venues has been the defining feature of his career: “I was very nervous about it. I loved it and I should have done more of them. I feel like I’ve written a show that is going to be very enjoyable for people and we’re doing that three nights in the Park Hotel and three nights in Athlone.”
At this point he has a good handle on identifying what his audience want: “I’m involved in so many different sports and that’s a big thing. I also do corporate gigs in Dublin, where I’ll have a lot of politicians at them.
“I often go to golf clubs or football clubs. I’ve done F1 and gone around the world with that. Everything is about ‘the room’, every gig is different and you have to know the room. It all comes with experience.”
The popularity of his Formula 1 sketches has even translated into adverts: “I wasn’t absorbed in F1 growing up. I was always into golf, but I played a lot of Gaelic football and soccer in school. They were the sports growing up.
“I was interested in F1 when Eddie Jordan was a team manager. When Eddie left, like a lot of people in Ireland, I stopped watching. But the Netflix series came out and my wife and I started watching it.
“I thought ‘this is brilliant for me’. The problem in a lot of sports, especially team sports, is finding characters. In football, or even in the GAA, everyone is so media trained now. It’s hard to get to know the real people, because they say the same things over and over again.
“In F1 though, and even to a lesser extent golf, they’ve just come right off the course or off the track and they have to speak to the media, and they’re probably annoyed.
“They don’t have a manager to speak for them. They have to just come out and show. So whatever emotions they’re going through, you get to see that.”
As an impressionist, Conor depends on those heightened emotions, but in an increasingly media managed environment, they are diminishing: “I do hope something happens in football, because I find with soccer in England, many of the characters are gone. In the last couple of years I lost Jose Mourinho, I lost Jürgen Klopp, Frank Lampard, and Harry Redknapp.
“Recently, I’ve done a lot more Irish political stuff than before. For a few years, politics in Ireland was a little bit boring. In the last year or two that’s changed. The election gave us Gerry the Monk, and Mary Lou going up against the two boys. There was any amount of content over the last year. I enjoyed it.”
As well as the high profile national names Conor has a few local characters he may break out for his return home gig: “I made a name down in Shamrocks doing my uncle Ned, also my other uncle, Martin, who is involved with Mullingar Town, I have been taking the mickey out of him for years. And I have a decent Des McGuire as well.
“I’d love it if some of them boys were actually famous, because I could do a serious, serious job on them,” he laughs.
A quick Google search of Conor throws up hundreds of clips of sketches he has performed over the years. Having a show that reflects that body of work is something audiences will expect: “I suppose being an impressionist is probably a little bit different than being a comedian.
“I never did the traditional stand-up comedy gig. It’s actually something I want to do, because it hones stage presence for the live show, it has a benefit the more time you are up there with a microphone in your hand.”
His peer group face similar challenges: “I’d be pally with Rory O’Connor from Rory’s Stories and content creators like Al Foran. I’ve got to know a lot of those lads online.
“I’ve met plenty of comedians, Deirdre O’Kane and Des Bishop. It’s always good to pick their brains as well, they’ve had great experiences and give you great insight. When I’m talking to comedians, I’m fascinated by their process, because they have a different style and a different way of making people laugh.”
Over the next few months, Conor will be fulfilling fixtures from Kerry to Donegal before he returns to Mullingar for his three-show run. The home tie is one he is looking forward to: “I find it an easier gig. The more knowledge you have about a place, the funnier you can make it, because people love when you personalise a gig for them.
“I go to a different place around the country and I might not know much about the town I’m in. Mullingar and Athlone, they’re the gigs that actually excite me the most.
“Especially Mullingar because I’m from Mullingar, I’ll have a lot more inside jokes and a lot more crack with the audience. It’s incredibly special coming home to do those gigs and it’s incredibly humbling, the support I get from people in Westmeath, it’s nuts.”
That love of performing in your home town is not universal: “I was talking to a fella about it before, he said he wouldn’t ever do a gig on in his town. He was under the impression that people would be sick listening to him, and be bored with him. I couldn’t get over that. When I put on gigs in Mullingar, it’s electric. I love them.”
Conor says the brief for the show is pretty simple: “It’s a few hours’ respite from the real world, a bit of crack, a laugh, and some sore ribs.”