[Rock bottom]

It’s a paradox: for such a small country, we have a stunning proportion of talented comedians: David O’Doherty, Dara O’Briain, Andrew Maxwell and Tommy Tiernan to name but a few.

Yet when it comes to translating our comic talent to the small screen, time and time again we seem to fall flat on our face. For anybody who loves comedy, it’s frustrating and hard to understand: how can we not get it right?

After a decade of tolerating this, people began to tell me that we had finally arrived with ‘Raw’ – RTE’s latest offering. Unfortunately, the humour was much like the water in our fountains across campus: absent. Instead it has been added to the comedic graveyard that is the RTE archives.

It’s quite a cluttered graveyard too: who could forget ‘Stew’? How about ‘The Roaring Twenties’? Cancelled after two episodes. Or, our attempt at ‘The Office’, ‘The English Class’?

In one fell swoop, RTE managed to not only perpetuate racial clichés but, perhaps worse, it perpetuated unfunny racial clichés and set back social integration by a decade. You begin to realise exactly why the Irish Film and Television Awards just don’t have a category for best sitcom: you’d struggle to even find one nominee a year.

It, perhaps, says a lot that – to find our last example of a quality Irish sitcom, you have to look to ‘Father Ted’ which, infamously, was produced by and shown on Channel 4. This proves that, while you can’t spell ‘Father Ted’ without ‘RTE’, you can certainly produce it without them: and thank goodness for that.

But what put us in this position? What made us so unfunny? Is it the ‘Head of Comedy’ in RTE who admits openly that he doesn’t really have much time for sitcoms?

For a sitcom to succeed, you normally need two main components: good writers and good comedians. On the first part; I think we know that, if there’s one thing Ireland can produce, it’s strong writing.
Secondly though, stand-up comedy in Ireland has never been going so strongly; David O’Doherty’s recent ‘if’-award victory in Edinburgh proved it to any critics. Meanwhile, numbers attending stand-up shows across the city have “tripled, at least”, according to Des Bishop.

Did the comfort, then, of prosperity give us this comedy drought? With the dawn of recession, might we see the rebirth (or, er, the birth) of the Irish sitcom? After all, if the characters in ‘Friends’ could afford their own apartments, then it wouldn’t have worked at all really, would it? Therefore, comedy fans should rejoice, welcome the recession and look forward to RTE’s new comedy schedule.