"WHEN the Good Friday peace agreement was made in 1998, I always knew that I was going to choose a perfect anniversary to launch my first shows in Northern Ireland," jokes Gift Grub man Mario Rosenstock of why it's taken him so long to bring his topical, impressions-packed live act north of the border.
"I said, 'What about just after the 25th anniversary?'. And that's exactly when I'm coming up."
Indeed, with our political institutions clearly no longer fit for purpose and a 'severe' terror threat level currently providing an unwelcome throwback to the bad old days, the imminent arrival of Gift Grub Live in Belfast and Derry this summer can only be considered a late-maturing peace dividend.
Dublin-based Rosenstock co-created the satirical impressions-based Gift Grub radio segment with Paul McCloone (radio presenter/Undertones frontman) for Today FM's Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show back in 1999, with the pair bringing the topical stories to life for comic effect.
Having taken sole control of Gift Grub back in 2004, Rosenstock's impressions of familiar characters from Irish politics, TV, sport and pop culture along with well-known figures from the international realm remain a fixture on the Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show to this day, with spin-off TV vehicles like RTÉ Two's The Mario Rosenstock Show and live tours allowing the comic to show off his physical comedy skills alongside those spot-on impressions.
"For years, people have been emailing me and tweeting me going, 'would you ever come up here?'," explains Rosenstock of his belated visit to the north.
"So, because I now have a new live show that I really love, we just said, 'Come on, we'll just give it a whirl - why not?'."
Of course, not all of Rosenstock’s regular characters from the Gift Grub radio show will be familiar to northern audiences, so it seems that we'll be treated to a special 'nordie-friendly' version of Gift Grub Live.
"I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to take about 50 per cent of my own show and I'm going to add a prosthetic limb of another 50 per cent which will be Northern Ireland-friendly," explains the actor turned comic, who appeared in RTÉ soap Glenroe back in the 90s prior to making his name on the radio by taking the hand out of everyone from Bertie Ahern and Bono to Roy Keane and Ronan Keating.
"And by that I don't just mean Northern Ireland characters. I also mean the prism through which Northern Ireland sees southern Ireland.
"For example, it's slowly dawning on me at the moment as I think about this that a lot of people in Northern Ireland, especially in Belfast, know next to nothing about Irish politics. So I may do something like a 'dummy's guide to Irish politics' for Northern Irish people.
"Maybe a little tiny symposium on Irish politics and its characters through the prism of the people from Northern Ireland who are watching: hopefully they might recognise certain characteristics in people down here that they also see in themselves up there."
While most of his Gift Grubbing is done on the airwaves with the aid of presenter Ian Dempsey, who introduces/sets up each skit and also helps with the writing behind the scenes, it's clear that Rosenstock has a definite talent for physically 'inhabiting' each character he takes on in a very funny way - a process enhanced for the live shows with costumes, silly wigs and other accoutrements.
"It's been an absolute joy," enthuses the mimic of getting to take his Gift Grub creations out on the road.
"I think maybe the appetite I had for doing it [live] has helped, because everyone is pretty much saying it's the best show I've done in 15 years.
"I use a very big screen, so I can be on stage as whomever and be talking to myself as other characters on the screen, like a kind of interview. But then I can also walk off stage and they can still be talking to each other until I come back on, like 30 seconds later, as somebody completely different. So there's a whole load of quick changes.
"It's pretty much all new material too, or it's old characters doing brand new stuff. And I think it's quite modern and up-to-date as well in terms of the tone and the stuff I'm talking about - not just the topicality, but in terms of whether it's 'wokeness' or political correctness or whatever that's touched upon.
"So it's quite modern and up-to-date and fun, and it's highly interactive as well."
Yes indeed, there's no escape from Gift Grub, even if you're the kind of shrinking violet who studiously avoids sitting in the front row, because you never know where Rosenstock will appear from - or whom he'll be when he does.
"All my shows are highly interactive," he enthuses with obvious glee.
"I do love to get audience participation into the show, so at a lot of my shows around Ireland the front two rows are empty. But I just tell them, 'No - there's always a 'front row', no matter where you sit'.
"A lot of characters I have come in from a different entrance anyway. So I might come in from the back of the theatre, or often up high in the stalls as well. So it's kind of like adult panto - I can come flying in from almost anywhere and do anything.
"For example, I might be dragging people up on stage and they'll suddenly realise that they're now Sinn Féin councillors, or that one is a Sinn Féinn councillor and the other is a DUP councillor, and that they have scripts in front of them to read, much to their chagrin. Things like that happen all the time."
As well doling out daily dollops of Gift Grub on the radio, the comedian is also now doing The Mario Rosenstock Podcast, a weekly one-on-one interview show in which he chats to all sorts of famous folks, including some of the very people he's impersonated over the years like Keith 'Howya buddies' Duffy and Louis Walsh, with the occasional 'caller' (voiced by Rosenstock in character) and Gift Grub-esque sketch thrown into the mix too.
"That's been a new departure, and a successful one," says Rosenstock.
"Everybody's doing a podcast, as you know, but the key question to ask when you do a podcast is, 'where's my lane?'. Do I have a little place that I can go?
"Everybody who listens to me down here would know that I'm a comedian, but then you hear me interview people with this bruise of 'live callers' that the guest kind of knows about, where I can say all sorts of things that I can't say as Mario.
"And we do comedy sketches and all that sort of stuff as well too. So that's our lane."
Slipping into armchair psychologist mode, I wondered if the fact that Rosenstock moved around Ireland a lot during his formative years might have had any influence on his comedy, particularly his ability to mimic almost any accent.
"I did move around a lot as a kid," offers the Gift Grub man, born in London to Irish parents who then returned to the motherland.
"I came from Waterford and then I went to places like Dublin and Cork, which means I had an awful lot of confidence to take on any characters from those regions.
"I wasn't ever going to feel I can't do them: I was going to go 'no, I own this - I lived there for two years'.
"The other thing then is meeting so many different people while moving around and wanting to fit in, if you like, means that you 'embed': you seek to embed yourself and then imitate or impersonate the creatures you want to immerse yourself with.
"There's a concept in Asian psychology that they call 'mirroring' and I remember when we moved down to Cork, within eight hours I was speaking like everybody else in Cork. So I would be a classic 'mirror'."
If comedy is just an amusingly distorted reflection of real life, it's little wonder Mario Rosenstock is a natural.
Gift Grub Live, Friday June 2, Waterfront Studio, Waterfront Hall, Belfast / Friday June 9, Millennium Forum, Derry. Tickets via ticketmaster.ie. Visit Gift Grub online at Todayfm.com/search/gift_grub
