Gift Grub & Me by Mario Rosenstock: Entertaining, very funny and extremely honest

Gift Grub & Me

Author: Mario Rosenstock

ISBN-13: 978-1785376061

Publisher: Merrion Press

Guideline Price: €22.99

Mario Rosenstock is a hugely popular impressionist and satirist who performs on the Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show on Today FM. The Gift Grub slot has made him a household name.

There is a Holy Communion (or Confirmation) picture on the back cover of Gift Grub & Me. Rosenstock is seated in an ornate chair, in a fancy blazer, a cheeky smile peering out from a strangely stylised, comical bob cut; the whole picture is in a frame straight from the National Gallery.

There’s a little of the Wes Andersons about it. Indeed, the early part of Rosenstock’s life is quite madcap in incident and characters. Usually, I find the least interesting part of any biography or autobiography to be the early, formative years but here it’s brilliant – like a comic novel. In his youth he was moved from place to place, but rather than being disruptive it seemed to inspire him; he embraced it.

His parents fought, “frequently physically … so home life was edgy and unpredictable, to say the least”. His earliest memory of making somebody laugh was when his parents were fighting and he mimicked his dad: “It stopped them fighting and turned their attention to me.”

When he was five, his parents asked him if he wanted to move to Germany with them. As he says himself: “It was a bizarre decision for a five-year-old to make.” He then lived on a farm with his bickering grandparents, whom he loved. He adds: “I do hope to get some therapy about this matter at some stage.”

It sounds quite stressful – traumatic even – yet there is a lightness of touch on Rosenstock’s part: is it an unwillingness or lack of a need to delve deeper?

He moved to Newpark School in Dublin, then boarding school in Cork where “within a week I had adopted the playful musicality of the Cork accent”. He took all these changes in his stride: “I wasn’t afraid to be the new kid. In fact, I leaned into it.”

Rosenstock realised he had to sink or swim. In Trinity, he continued his love affair with the stage and generally played the part of the fop. After various failed auditions he got the part of the heart-throb in Glenroe.

[ Mario Rosenstock: ‘Everyone lost money in the crash. I was no different, but it never bothered me’Opens in new window ]

Then there are early days of Gift Grub: the hard work; the technicalities of trying to “get” an accent down; the need for some hook or “in” to get that accent; the aspect that will be exaggerated. Bertie Ahern and Michael Flatley are two early favourites. There are transcripts of sketches and we join him entertaining José Mourinho and experiencing the stress of meeting Roy Keane. (He made his Roy Keane more likable by giving him a “little laugh”.) He captures the pre-live show nervousness nicely. He names the stress yet deals with it with equanimity.

He is a big fan of Vincent Browne (“America had Woodward and Bernstein, Ireland had Vincent Browne”) and Miriam O’Callaghan (“A national treasure”).

His thumbnail sketches here of different taoisigh are very interesting and provide an insightful overview of the politics of the last 30 to 40 years, particularly the bank bailout period. Of all the politicians he met, he was most impressed with former minister for finance Paschal Donohoe.

Rosenstock considers him a decent, hardworking man of great intellect. He mentions that Donohoe left for a job with the World Bank but does not mention that before he left Government, he approved an extra €10 million contribution to the World Bank – €141 million as opposed to the €131 million requested by the World Bank itself. Surely this is a subject ripe for satirical attack? But this is not Rosenstock’s style. As he himself says: “I’m not even controversial.” He is disappointed because Donohoe was a great Gift Grub character.

His is the way of the entertainer. Perhaps his success and longevity as part of a morning radio show is that he was not generally of the hard-hitting variety of satire – Hall’s Pictorial Weekly (particularly the earlier version) or The Savage Eye – but rather an entertainer satirist who leans more towards the impressionist element rather than the hard content satirical style. “I’m not an activist or a ‘campaigning’ comedian,” Rosenstock says.

There is a very interesting chapter on censorship called “Saying Whatever The F**k You Want”. It specifically considers The Late Late Show and RTÉ (his own experience of censorship), then the wider cultural context, looking at the ways comedians constantly have to negotiate the boundaries of what can and cannot be said. It is to his credit that he has negotiated these boundaries to achieve such longevity and popularity. To perform continually from 1999 to today with up to a quarter of a million listeners is highly impressive.

This autobiography is hugely interesting, entertaining, often very funny and extremely honest.

Kevin Gildea is a comedian and a critic.