Regaling Audiences With Gaelic Humor

Guess what: Hal Roach is coming back to town.

No, not the late producer of classic film comedies, who died in 1992, but the grandfatherly stand-up comic from Ireland who pokes hilarious fun at all those endearing Gaelic foibles.

“Barry Fitzgerald took me to a pub,” he says of an evening long ago, which was spent with the late, beloved Irish actor. “And he said to the bartender, ‘Give me two pints of Guinness, two whiskeys and two brandies.’ Then he looked at me and said, ‘What are you having?’ ”

This Roach, it seems, is popular in two exclusive circles: show business professionals and the Irish. He broke into English music halls in the ‘40s as a boy magician, then shed his props when the jokes began to click.

He opened for scores of touring American entertainers--Vic Damone, Sophie Tucker, Judy Garland, Sarah Vaughn, the Ink Spots. He then spent 28 years as the comic host of Jury’s Irish Cabaret in Dublin, a touristy theatrical revue with plenty of music and dancing.

He retired from Jury’s when he reached his mid-60s and has been on a solo world tour ever since. He begins a West Coast swing tonight in Thousand Oaks with a sure-fire routine: hours of jokes delivered with an uncanny sense of timing.

Reached by telephone at Garrivhan Nua, his 20-acre farm in the mountains overlooking Dublin Bay, Roach said that life on the road has has its tangible rewards.

“You don’t make a lot of money in Ireland in show business,” he said. “I’ve got to where I make more money in a night than I would for six weeks in Jury’s.”

Lately he has been trying to line up more television dates.

“Whenever I’m on, I get a tremendous reaction,” he said, noting that an appearance on “Live with Regis and Kathie Lee” in 1989 elicited stacks of viewer mail. “Being on TV is a must to be successful in America.”

It’s also important, he said, to translate home-grown stories for audiences abroad.

“If you say we should go to Murphy’s pub for a bit of craic, the Americans think you mean cocaine or something like that,” Roach said. “We have to explain that craic is Irish for humor. So I always take the stage manager out to lunch and go through my act with him. He says ‘No, they won’t understand that,’ or ‘That’s a good one,’ and so on, and gives me an idea where I’m going.”

Those studious habits contributed to his writing 10 books of humorous observations, including “The Healing Power of Humor,” “The Unnecessary Sayings of the Irish in Conversation” and the one that will strike a familiar chord in everyone who has an Irish mother--or mother-in-law, “We Irish Talk Like That.”

The Irish “answer questions first and then we ask them,” he explained. “We say, ‘You won’t have a drink, will you?’ and, ‘You’re not going out, are you?”

Over the years he has collected thousands of jokes, and along the way has become known by the catch phrase “Write It Down.”

It started one night when he spotted a woman in the audience furiously scribbling notes.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ She said, ‘Writing down your jokes.’ In a while I said, ‘You tell me if I’m going too fast for you and I’ll slow down a bit.’ The audience loved the little repartee between me and this woman. And for some reason I threw it in again the next night, ‘Write it down.’

“Now they all know me by that,” he said. “I was walking down the street in Hong Kong and people shouted at me, ‘Write it down!’ ”

He is glad to return to Southern California where, for the past two years, he has achieved a professional triumph: holding onto an audience at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia in the middle of the cacophonous Southern California Irish Fair.

“There are 150 things going on all around you,” he said. “A pipe band walked right by and they didn’t even look at me. So I started to tell jokes about pipes. I said we Irish invented the bagpipes and gave it to Scotland as a joke. And the reason that pipers keep walking is they’re trying to get away from the noise.”

He was introduced at Santa Anita by Tom McConville of North Hollywood, host of “The Irish Hour” broadcast at 3:05 p.m. Sundays on KIEV-AM (870).

“He’s a great representative for Ireland,” McConville said. “And he never tells a dirty joke. The closest is when he says, ‘I was one of 17 children. We had our mother on a pedestal. We had to put her there to keep our father away from her.’ ”

His many jokes, his long years in the business and his commanding stage presence have won Roach great respect among fellow entertainers.

“Technically, he is a master. His skills are superb,” said satirist Mark Russell, who has included Roach in a few of his PBS specials, including “Mark Russell’s Irish Fling.”

“But one thing I wish he wouldn’t do is tell the audience to write the jokes down,” Russell said. “There is nothing more painful than a Texan trying to retell a Hal Roach joke.”

Russell also calls Roach “the Bob Hope of Ireland,” drawing a comparison that is inescapable to anyone who has seen Roach wringing hilarity out of timeworn material.

Comedian Bob Newhart, who says he is three-fourths Irish, agreed: “Some of the jokes you’ve heard before, but you laugh because of the way they’re delivered.”

“I get a kick out of him because Irish humor is kind of dark,” said Newhart, who caught the show at Jury’s several years ago while in Ireland revisiting his family heritage. “It has a lot to do with drinking, wakes, mothers-in-law and the church-- those four things--that’s kind of the whole spectrum of Irish humor.”

But the distinguishing element of Roach’s art, Newhart said, is his timing.

“Timing is like music,” Newhart said. “It’s something you hear in your head, and some people hear it and some people don’t. Well, Hal hears that.”

Roach also heard the siren call of show business early in life.

He was born John Roach in Waterford City, where a school teacher noticed his resemblance to the late Carl Switzer’s character Alfalfa in the “Our Gang” comedies--produced, ironically, by the American Hal Roach--and dubbed him Alfalfa, a moniker eventually shortened to Hal.

When he was 7, he first walked on stage in his school’s nativity play.

“I was a funny-looking kid,” he said. “I had glasses and a slight turn in my left eye. When I walked on as one of the shepherds, the whole place broke up. I was born to be what I am.”

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DETAILS

* WHAT: Hal Roach, The King of Blarney.

* WHERE: Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. tonight.

* HOW MUCH: $13.50 and $23.50.

* CALL: (805) 583-8700 (tickets) or (805) 449-ARTS (information).