Occasionally, other TodayFM employees arrive, don a set of headphones, deliver a few lines, then abandon him to his lonely tirade. At some point late in the evening, when most other workers have left the building, Rosenstock emerges from his cubicle and the comedy sketches for the following morning’s Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show will be in the can, ready to play to an eager audience. He has been making the nation laugh most mornings since 1999, but for Rosenstock comedy is a serious business.
“It’s a huge strain. I write it all,” he maintains. “I’d love to farm some of it out, but that’s my job.”
He may find it a strain, but such single-mindedness is the reason behind his success: he has built his Gift Grub sketches into such a recognisable brand that he’s now on his seventh Christmas compilation CD. There have been other contributors to Gift Grub — one is currently involved in a legal dispute with Rosenstock — but it is Rosenstock’s drive and creativity that transformed a five-minute comedy slot into a lucrative franchise.
And it is lucrative: last year’s Gift Grub CD sold more than 100,000 copies, a huge number by Irish standards. His fame has grown, too: it seems no coincidence that the cover of his current offering is a pastiche photoshoot from a celebrity gossip magazine: “It’s a conglomerate of all the horrible celebrities I could think of. I want people to look at the album and think ‘Who the f*** does that guy think he is?’” Who indeed? Bertie Ahern, Roy Keane, Joe Duffy, Marian Finucane, Ronan Keating, Twink, John Creedon, Jose Mourinho, Tony Blair — the catalogue of personalities Rosenstock can mimic is seemingly limitless and this, combined with his shrewdly-targeted writing, lies at the heart of Gift Grub’s appeal.
In person, Rosenstock is intense, driven and an irrepressible talker. As well as being able to do the voices, he is also possessed of the ambition and sense of self-worth that every celebrity, footballer or politician needs to make it to the top. Rosenstock understands what makes these people tick because, in his own head, he is one of their number.
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The surname comes from his grandfather George, who was a German army doctor in occupied Jersey during the second world war. His own performing started in Blackrock, where he grew up with his brother Rene, his mother Patricia, and his English-teacher father Pascal, who also writes.
“From a very young age, Rene and I put on mini-plays for my folks. We realised early on that it was a good way of getting attention.” Yet Rosenstock has none of the darkness in his background that one typically associates with comics: when he was sent to boarding school as a teenager it wasn’t for the traditional teenage crime of unbridled hedonism.
“I was not doing well in Newpark (his previous school). I was a tennis freak and missing a lot of school, and my parents wanted to put manners on me. But I was obsessed with the rivalry between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe and wanted to do nothing else with my life except become a tennis pro. But I abandoned my dream in 1985, when I was under-15 and an under-12 girl from England came over here and beat me. That’s when I realised I needed something else. But I was a jock, I had hardly read any books. Then, I saw my brother in a school play, and I saw everyone in the audience looking at him, and I thought, ‘I gotta do that’.”
The following year, aged 16, he landed the part of the 63-year-old Willy Loman in a school production of Death of a Salesman. “Going into another person’s life was such a thrill for me, and that’s when I decided to become an actor. My new idol became Al Pacino. Although I studied Economics and Politics at Trinity, I really went there to act.”
Through the Trinity Players, Rosenstock appeared in 15 productions in four years and upon graduation went straight into RTE’s Glenroe. “I played a very cardboard doctor,” he adds, “ and my only way out was to drink myself to death, which I eventually did.”
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Even so, Rosenstock’s acting career never took off and he drifted into the then-chaotic Radio Ireland, which is now TodayFM. Gift Grub was born in 1999 out of his partnership with Paul McLoone, then the producer of the Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show. “Paul is one of the most talented people I know, in every direction. I look back on those days and they were good times. He was a collaborator, not a contributor, but nowadays, contributors come and go.”
This is currently a sensitive area for Rosenstock, as a former TodayFM newsreader called Oliver Callan is threatening legal action over contributions used in the current album. “Vexatious and scurrilous,” Rosenstock snorts, sounding not unlike a barrister from one of his own sketches. “Contributors have nothing to do with the show, they just do voices on an ad-hoc basis. It’s part of my job to look out for good vocal talents, and anything voiced for TodayFM belongs to TodayFM. I do all the writing, and that’s the most important thing.”
Generating mainstream material is Rosenstock’s daily challenge, but it can also be frustrating.
“It’s a family show, so we have to aim straight down the middle. Lewdness is off the cards, absolutely no smut, and as for the more heated political stuff, I just don’t go there. So yes, there are restrictions. Which is a pity, because I have an evil sense of humour, which I’d like to vent elsewhere.”
A salient example of Gift Grub’s limitations lies with its portrayal of the taoiseach as a bumbling, good-time guy. Ahern is an avowed fan, perhaps because Rosenstock’s caricature replicates the one that he and his spinners promote.
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Nonetheless, Rosenstock is far from insecure about his product. “The Irish Times and RTE are always spouting off with this word ‘satire’, and I don’t know what it means.
I watch Rory Bremner and I don’t laugh by the hour. Surely what you’re meant to do, first and foremost, is make the audience laugh.”
One senses a large streak of the frustrated film actor in Rosenstock and, at 36, he is adamant that he will not be doing Gift Grub for another seven years. However, his next move is, as yet, unclear.
“I find it hard to find a vehicle for my talents. I don’t want to be Alistair McGowan, I’m not interested in those high production values, but with not many laughs at the end of it. I do have something in development with RTE for television, and I did a pilot for Channel 4, but nothing has come of it.”
But if Rosenstock is concerned that his career has hit a plateau, he is not overly worried.
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“Part of the problem is I think I may have already peaked in the UK. I did this Jose Mourinho track in February that made it into the Top 40 for about 10 minutes. I earned £59 from it and Top of the Pops was cancelled soon afterwards. But as for Gift Grub, I haven’t outgrown it yet. I’m still developing as a performer, and any performance is acting. It’s all a show, and at the moment, I have the best job in the world.” After a reflective pause, he adds: “To be honest, these days, I’m more concerned about my waistline than I am about my punchlines.”
Gift Grub is out on EMI Ireland