Comedian Jason Byrne: ‘Let everybody laugh at whatever they think is funny and leave them to it’
Irish comedian Jason Byrne has very fond memories of the last time he performed at Cambridge Junction – but it’s not for the reasons you might expect.
He explains: “I did this thing a long time ago – I only got to do it once because every venue said please don’t do that again – which was ask the crowd at the break if they could steal as much stuff as possible, from around the venue, and leave it on the stage.
“I came back out on stage at Cambridge and they... above and beyond is all I can say. There was furniture from the foyer, coffee machines, chairs balancing on top of each other – they stole everything and the venue went crazy. But the crowd were crying laughing.”
So out of all the venues on that tour, Cambridge ‘won’? “I think Cambridge and Norwich would have been very close together,” admits Jason, who undertook a tour of Sweden and Finland a couple of months ago, “but Cambridge definitely pushed it over the edge.
“I mean Norwich did go outside and get some roadwork signs – actual big red ones – and also brought in some bags of sand, so they did leave the venue which was a bit cheating...”
He adds: “I love gigging that venue [the Junction], it’s really good – more or less the same people come back each year and they’re just getting older. I’ve had 16-year-olds there and now they’re in their 20s. The crowd all kind of know each other at that gig. I’ve always had great fun there.”
Jason’s current tour is called Unblocked and it is set to roll into Cambridge on October 21. “The reason why I called this show Unblocked was first of all because I had heart surgery,” he explains, “so I’ve got my arteries unblocked, but also we’re all free to do stuff now – the Covid, for now, has eased off.
“I used to always get people up on stage to do some fun stuff with me, fun little silly stunts, and now I can do that again, because the last tour I couldn’t. All the physical contact will be back fully on this tour, and Cambridge have also surpassed themselves with getting up and joining in with things, no problem. I can ask any of them and they go, ‘Yep, OK’. I had a guy once up on stage with a broken foot.”
Jason, 50, reveals that it was hereditary cholesterol which led him to need heart surgery, and that it didn’t matter how fit he was or what his diet was like. “The cholesterol was going to build up anyway,” he notes, “and even if your granny has it, or your grandad, or your great-grandad, it still might get you.
“So I just had a high build-up of cholesterol that blocked up three arteries – not fully; obviously if they were fully blocked I would have been in trouble. But they were like 90 per cent and two 70 per cents, and the 90 per cent full one was the one I felt – the two 70s you wouldn’t feel; your blood would still flow through there.”
He adds: “I have heart disease – I’ll always have that – but I get scanned every six months and I’m on these new tablets and I just watch my diet, and there we go we’re all back to normal again. So it’s great and I can’t wait to unleash the full madness on Cambridge, which they won’t really mind and they’re great at heckling. They will shout at me quite a lot so there’s no problem there.”
Jason, who was previously awarded the UK radio industry’s Sony Radio Gold Award for his Radio 2 show – he has also hosted his own chat show, Jason Byrne’s Snaptastic Show, for TV3 in Ireland – stresses the importance of being able to laugh at adversity.
“That’s the thing isn’t it? I mean a lot of things in life... I read a lot of books while I was sitting around recovering and one of them was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which was great.
“He was in Auschwitz and he was psychotherapist so he helped keep other prisoners going. But he said the one thing that even though they’re in bed at night with no shoes or socks on, freezing cold, dying in their beds, that when they laughed about something it gave them that little bit of escape right in that moment, and that’s what I try to do now.
“So I don’t walk around going, ‘Oh my God I had heart surgery, it’s horrendous, I can’t talk’ – I now just have fun. I got get-well-soon messages on Facebook and a lot of them from around the world said well done, great to have your heart going, excellent, but the majority of the Irish were like take it easy, don’t go too hard...
“One woman said, ‘My husband had eight stents put in and he was very sick afterwards’, and then she said, ‘He had brain tumours a week later and then he died a few months ago’ and then she says, ‘but best of luck’. That’s real – I read that out on stage!
“So the only way to approach something like this is to just go with the flow now and just enjoy what I do for a living, because it is amazing what we do. Making people laugh in a room is a great feeling; when something that you’ve worked on or written, or you’ve even made up on the spot, and they react so well, it’s a great feeling – it’s a feeling that you can’t get from any drug or any drink or anything.”
As an aside, Jason revealed in an interview with the Irish Mirror in 2021 that he almost quit comedy to become a psychotherapist, before a forensic scientist convinced him to stick at it and use his humour to help people.
Indeed, Unblocked focuses on how good it is to be alive and to be able to enjoy oneself again – and laugh – in the wake of the pandemic. “I once met two lovely old women outside my show in Edinburgh,” recalls Jason.
“They were in their 70s and one woman said to me – they were waiting in the rain under an umbrella, I didn’t even know they were down there – ‘Jason, we wanted to stay and say to you thank you so much for making us laugh’.
“One of the ladies, her husband had died six months previously and she hadn’t left the house at all. She went to the local shop, I think, but this was the first night out where she was going to enjoy herself and her friend made her go to see me.
“And the other woman was like tears in her eyes and the other woman had tears in her eyes, and I had tears in my eyes, and she was just going, ‘Thank you Jason, thank you for letting me laugh – I haven’t laughed since my husband died’.
“So it is so important what we do for a living. Laughter is a total escape from your life – the second you laugh, and as you’re laughing, it’s impossible to think about something bad that’s happening in your life. You even see people when they’re in shock, or something bad happens to them, they start laughing – I just think it’s really odd.
“So even though you’ll get a lot of people trying to say, ‘Oh you shouldn’t say this and you shouldn’t say that, and you shouldn’t talk about that’, well if you don’t like that, then just don’t go.
“Comedy is there for people to laugh and laughter is something that humans have to do – it’s for their mental health. And everybody finds different things funny. Let everybody laugh at whatever they think is funny and leave them to it.”
Jason’s brand of organised chaos and creative audience participation has resulted in him being hailed as “the outright king of live comedy” by The Times. “I certainly wouldn’t put that on a poster,” he states, sounding somewhat embarrassed at the mention of it.
“But my promoter keeps putting that on the poster – because as an Irishman, there’s no way I would say I’m the outright king of anything! I put up on my Instagram I’m the best comedian in the world, says my mother, so I think I’d rather that.
“There is no outright king of comedy, or queen of comedy, or anything of comedy because everybody’s style is different. No comedian is the same to each other. You might see somebody who might be a bit similar but they’re talking about their own personal life a lot, or their own personal humour is coming out through their gags, but yeah, there is no king of comedy.”
[Read more: Interview: Patrick Kielty heading to Cambridge with his new show, Borderline, Comedian Leo Kearse: ‘You’ll see more exciting stuff in the clubs than you will on the BBC’]
As well as co-presenting Wild Things on Sky One, Jason’s other television appearances include The Royal Variety Performance, The Graham Norton Show, Live at the Apollo, and John Bishop’s Christmas Show.
He is also a highly sought-after TV regular in Australia, having appeared on the prestigious Melbourne International Comedy Festival televised galas and The Great Debate, as well as Network Ten’s The Project.
Jason Byrne will be appearing at the Junction’s J2 on Friday, October 21. For more information and to book tickets visit junction.co.uk. For more on Jason, go to jasonbyrne.ie.
