If someone dangles a wage packet in front of you and says “Be tragic” you can usually muddle through. Put some characters together, give them a dream that just might come true, then kick the legs out from under them. It’s a snap.

Someone dangles a wage packet in front of you and says “Be funny” and you’re in trouble. You can usually fill the space, maybe use a few one-liners to retread an old formula, but it shows. And when it doesn’t work it’s like someone just walked into the room and caught you making faces in the mirror. Embarrassing.

It’s a risky business, trying to be funny. Every now and then someone asks why RTÉ has such a bad record at comedy. The answer is, it’s a risky business and RTÉ is an institution wherein risk-taking is frowned upon.

If even half the stories about Dermot Morgan’s comedy series are true, about how it was got at by the people in suits and edited down to last week’s Dermot Morgan Special, then it’s unfair to judge Morgan or producer John Keogh by what we saw. But their names were on the label.

The mish-mash was an embarrassment. All the more so because the trailer for the programme, in which Pat Kenny did one of those macho Today Tonight jobs where you stick the microphone up the victim’s left nostril and ask him isn’t it true he’s a louser, was so good.

There were some good bits in the special. The Wolfe Tones take-offs, mainly. But Morgan was swimming towards us through a swamp of mediocrity, shouting his jokes too loudly. Morgan is usually funny, sometimes hilarious, sometimes flat, like most people who make a living at trying to be funny. His Saturday morning radio show has an Eamon Dunphy who’s even funnier than the real Eamon Dunphy. Last week, in the wake of the news that the Catholic church is going broke, the show had a piece in which the receiver is called in, [and] a bunch of priests stage a sit-in to fight for their jobs.

If Morgan is funny how come the TV special was so bad? There were three stages to the making of the show. The original material, the handling of the material, and the cobbling together of the special.

The original material, what we saw of it, was strained in places, but there were good ideas. The length of time between writing and broadcasting rules out topicality, which means every piece has to stand up as a self-contained scoop of humour, a much more difficult job. It can be done, but it’s hard to produce it in volume.

The handling of the material was dire. The songs, for instance, were filmed when they would have been more effective if videotaped in the studio with two or three cameras and an extra hour of technical rehearsal. The cutting from one “Wolfe Tone” to another was haphazard and unsympathetic to the material. The piece on pub behaviour would have been better without Morgan up front; maybe with him doing a Gerrit van Geld[e]ren voice-over (it was still one of the better pieces). The use of a static camera in medium long-shot for the mad rugby player was disconcerting, though there’s not much you can do with a sketch like that if you’re working on film. The poor production quality might be the result of a lack, as much as of a misuse, of resources. Whatever, we were still shortchanged.

The way in which the “special” was cobbled together was the funniest joke on the screen that night. There was a laugh-track so ineptly chosen that every time Morgan twitched it seemed like a Croke Park-size audience howled. Running gags, which might have run well week by week, were thrown in carelessly (aw, no, not the goddamn rugby player again).

Okay, the Dermot Morgan Special made Leave It To Mrs O’ Brien look like a vicarage tea party. So, put the axe away for a minute.

Morgan is a good scriptwriter, an excellent mimic, and he knows about humour. John Keogh has a good track record in radio humour and in TV production. Maybe they just blew it. They’re entitled. Maybe the suits upstairs mucked them around.

Whatever it was, somebody took the teeth out of the thing and Morgan ended up not funny but gummy. Where was his mad Garret, his pompous Charlie?

Morgan had a go at the Wolfe Tones, it worked. Mine’s-a-pint Republicanism is a worthy target. It is also an easy one. Mocking republicans, or even pseudolicans, makes you brownie points with the suits. It can even be, and was, funny. But if that’s the extent of your risk-taking you’re in trouble.

“That Crowd”, on the Late Late, might work out into something if we don’t watch them too closely, just let them get on with it in the autumn. The TV Gaga comedians range from dreadful to inspired (who was that guy who did to Garret so excellently what Morgan failed to do?). Comedians like these and Dermot Morgan have a right to failure now and then. If RTÉ is ever going to consistently produce decent comedy it will be through people like these, who will sometimes do a pratfall and just look silly. They need resources and less interference from the suits. Otherwise we’ll go on importing thick British comedians for the Derek Davis shows and occasionally hauling on the homegrown imitators of the thickies from the clubs and pubs around town. And the civil servants who produce the likes of Mrs O’ Brien will be allowed to go on codding themselves that they’re producing comedy.