Shortly after phoning Jason Byrne, Hoot Press feels a little guilty, as it turns out the comedian is in the middle of his holidays, before resuming touring with a show at the Galway Arts Festival.

“Because I spend so much time touring, I’ve taken my holidays at home,” he says. “I despise going on holidays (laughs). All I ever do is travel from airport to airport and maybe occasionally get the train. I was only recently away at a spa with my wife Brenda and I was sitting out the back of it, and they said, ‘It must be nice to get away from it all.’ And I turned to Brenda and went, ‘We live away from it all! We live in the fucking countryside, what are we doing here?!’”
Enjoying a stay-cation he may be, but Byrne admits that he never stops writing. He has been working on a script for a sitcom pilot and is continually working on material for his live shows.
“I’m supposed to be on holiday, but at night I’ll be sitting there at my computer writing bits and pieces,” says Byrne. “My wife will be looking at me and I’ll be going, ‘I’m just looking at the internet! Just seeing where we can go tomorrow.’ But yeah, I never stop writing. In fact, yesterday, I was doing something and I thought, ‘I have to write that into my stand-up’. I’ve become such an old man. My kids were down the garden and my wife was at the shops, and we have these extortionate ESB bills. I was wondering how the fuck they were so dear, so I kept switching things on and off. I went to the meter and I was watching these wheels going round and round, to try and see what was using the most electricity.
“After looking at the situation, I came up with an equation. You have the wheels spinning around very fast, versus washing machines, dryers, immersions and so on. Eventually, if you add them all up, take away some shit, the E=MC2 answer is – a kettle. That’s what it is, it’s the fucking kettle! The fucking wheel flies around, you wouldn’t fucking believe it. Next time I go up to my dad, he’ll love all that. He’ll go, ‘That’s what I’ve been telling these people for fucking years!’”
Has Jason yet taken up the classic dad activity of D.I.Y.?
“Well, I’m an expert in IKEA,” he replies. “I can put any of that together, I’ve been through so much of it. I think at this stage, you have to be an absolute mickey not to be able to do it. It cannot help you any more, it’s going, ‘Put this here’, with arrows and numbers and everything. I quite like doing that, it’s good. And the only D.I.Y. I can do outside of that is electrics. I’m never very good at sawing, hammering and screwing things together, it’s always a mess, but I know electrics quite well. That’s why I’m quite anxious – I always want to do stand-up because I can work. Most stand-ups are spas, they can’t even… I remember Dylan Moran telling me he couldn’t even wire a plug. I went, ‘What the fuck? Of course you can.’ He goes, ‘No, I can’t!’ I was like, ‘Jesus Christ!’ Thank god I’m not that bad.”
A few years ago, P.J. Gallagher told me about his pre-stand days working in a warehouse, where Jason was one of fellow employees. Jason credits this with giving him a solid grounding in manual tasks.
“That’s where we learned all our electrical stuff,” he nods. “It was basically lights, so we used to wire up the stuff and everything. It’s fucking simple. I mean, electricians are bastards. They come up to your house and go, ‘Oh, I don’t know’. I actually know what they’re doing, so I’m going, ‘No, hang on a minute, for fuck’s sake.’ I know exactly what you need there.”
In the same interview, Gallagher also recalled the occasion in Vicar St. he strolled across the stage naked with a sweeping brush, whilst Byrne was in the middle of his set.
“Yeah, he came out naked with his cock between his legs, brushing the stage,” he recalls. “That doesn’t really happen too much anymore! It wasn’t pre-planned. I was in the middle of doing stand-up, and I think he’d played support earlier that evening. Then he just walks across the stage with his cock between his legs. But we had great fun together, it’d be great to do some more stuff, we always have a great laugh.
“I didn’t really react, I just went, ‘Oh, there’s P.J. in the nip’. He just kept brushing and that was it, I continued on. It did bring the house down. But I don’t mind people doing that stuff to me, ‘cos I quite like it. Other comics wouldn’t know what to do, they’d start getting all fucking precious. In Edinburgh that’s all we ever did to each other – try and ruin each other’s shows.”
During Byrne’s gala slot at the Melbourne Comedy Festival earlier this year, he recreated one of David Copperfield’s ‘illusions’, which involved the ‘magician’ being levitated. The similarities in Jason’s act, though, were largely confined to the comic copying Copperfield’s atrocious hair and wearing the same kind of black outfit. The levitation part of the act was achieved through the simple act of having a group of guys from the audience hoist Byrne in the air.
“That was great,” he enthuses. “It was the only time I’ve ever done it – I can’t do it again in the live show, ‘cos that was for TV. Beforehand, they had to get the five guys who carried me to sign something saying, ‘Will you carry Jason?’, in case I’d snap my back. And I never met those fellas – I never want to meet them, because otherwise it’s not as funny. They were just five random guys; I think one of them was a carpenter, another was an electrician and so on. But I’d have to get people to sign every night. At the moment, I’m working on an end stunt like that – it was just hilarious.”

Jason Byrne plays the Seapoint Leisure Centre on July 26 as part of the Galway Arts Festival. Catch him every Monday from 10am to noon on Phantom 105.2fm