Andrew's Day

Andrew Maxwell’s sage advice to any brave souls aspiring to make their living as a stand-up comedian is comically simple. “Ultimately, the main thing you must remember at all times on stage is that you’re the joke. Even if you’re joking about a world event, or you’re railing against something that you don’t like, you must always remember that ultimately you’re the joke. You’re the grown up that needs so much attention. You’re the man-child up at one end of the room, going, ‘Hey, everybody, LOOKATME!LOOKATME!LOOKATME!LOOKATME!LOOKATME!LOOKATME!’ You know what I mean?

“And that’s almost always why open-spots fail, because they can’t get their head around that. The prospect of failure so fills them with dread that they lose all fuckin’ sense of humour about themselves.”
Having spent pretty much all of his adult life imploring audiences to look at him, with much success in recent years, Maxwell knows what he’s talking about. Although best-known in Ireland for his smart-arsed, scalpel-sharp and sometimes surreal performances on RTÉ gagfest The Panel, the 35-year-old has built up a fairly glittering comic CV at this stage.
The floppily fringed Dub has performed in comedy clubs all over the world, appeared on everything from Never Mind The Buzzcocks to Have I Got News For You?, released two successful DVDs, and basically laughed his way through the Noughties. For all of his stellar success, he’s still remarkably down to earth – except, of course, when he’s performing at Altitude, the annual Alpine comedy festival he founded a couple of years ago (of which more later).
Born into a working-class Protestant family in Dublin in 1974, Maxwell was raised in Kilbarrack and attended Mount Temple Comprehensive (whose other famous past pupils include all four members of U2). Although he has nothing but good words for his old alma mater, he wasn’t a successful student.
“I wanted to be a stand-up comedian from about the age of 16,” he says. ”I want it known that all the teachers that sort of encouraged U2 were the same teachers that encouraged me. There was always an open-hearted policy at the school to be expressive, you know. And my first ever gig was in my history teacher’s Donal Moxon’s flat, to my mates, in his kitchen.
“So there was always that sort of thing. And although I was obviously a pain in the arse in class, none of the teachers kind of ground it out of me or anything like that. The idea of, like, the way so many of my mates grew up, you know, Christian Brothers fuckin’ beatin’ the shit out of them, was just completely absurd to me. That just wouldn’t have happened at Mount Temple.”
Although he didn’t actually fail his Leaving Cert, he didn’t get enough points to go to university either. “Yeah, I failed to get enough points to go to university. And I was repeating me Leaving at Ringsend, and then I just started doing stand-up, and just dropped out. I just thought, ‘Fuck this’.”
By that stage, he’d already started doing regular open-mic spots in the legendary Comedy Cellar upstairs in the International Bar. “I was 17 when I showed up there, and was essentially a fuckin’ really moody, grumpy teenager,” he recalls. “A fella with enormous problems with authority. And, you know, Barry Murphy; Ardal O’Hanlon; Kevin Gildea; Dermot Carmody; Alex Lyons – all the boys, man, they all just took me under their wing. There was never any kind of fuckin’ seniority, there was never any pissing fuckin’ order, you know what I mean? There was never any, ‘Hey, fuck you! You get out’. And that’s the school of comedy that I grew up in.”

At the age of 20, he graduated from the Comedy Cellar and took off for the glittering lights of London to make his name. He still lives in the city today, with his girlfriend and their two young children.
He makes it clear that his family is off-limits in this interview: “I have a family, a very beautiful family, but – before you go any further –I don’t talk about me family in the public realm. I’m in show business, but they’re not in show business. And I personally find it repugnant when I see celebrities selling whatever the fuck they’re selling by selling pictures of their kids. It just ain’t cool, man.”
It took some time for Maxwell’s talent to be recognised, and he worked at a number of minimum wage jobs during his early years in London. “I used to stack shelves and all that kinda stuff. I used to work for my old man in Dublin. And when I came over here at 20, I used to stack shelves at Tesco. When I was still back home in Ireland I worked at a golf course, which is fucking challenging work for a young man. Caddying and that sort of carry on. I was also a security guard, as well. I used to work in the back of cash-in-transit vans going around collecting money from Credit Unions in Finglas and Blanchardstown.”
That must have been tough on the nerves.
“Hell . . . yeahhhh!” he laughs.
It’s been a long time since Maxwell has had to stack shelves to earn a crust. A regular laughing head on TV and an extremely busy stand-up, he tells me that he gigs almost constantly throughout the year. While he doesn’t have a preference between live performance and TV work, the latter medium is obviously better for any comedian’s career prospects.
“Well, you know TV is thunderous fun, it’s relatively easy, and it moves your shit forward in a massive way,” he says. “As a comedian you treat every gig as a gig, you know what I mean? In your head, whether it’s Have I Got News For You? or the club gig that you did last night, they’re both gigs and you just want to do really well at both of them.
“But the impact for people on the outside looking in at you is vast, and you know, it’s extraordinary. I think that by far the most fun thing I’ve done on TV is The Panel. Because there’s always TV censors that are always tinkering with shit and trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s part of their job to justify what the fuck they do, you know? Amongst everything else.
“And The Panel is just the most simplistic but obvious format: just let a bunch of comedians who, in their own right are funny but are also friends, sit around a table in front of a live audience, and talk. But it literally wouldn’t have got off the ground if it hadn’t been already running for 15/20 odd years in Oz and Dara [O’Briain] had bought it, you know, brought it over. Do you know what I mean, there’s no way it would have ever got commissioned: ‘Well where’s the quiz round?’”
He attributes the show’s success to the fact that all the comedians involved are genuine friends.
“It is just the most spectacularly perfect TV format for Irish people,” he says. “It’s a no-brainer. Anybody can get it, right. ‘Oh yeah, they’re just doing what we do in the boozer’. Around the table, you know. I always thought, from my end, the real success of The Panel is the genuine warmth between us. We are mates, we spend all day bickering with each other, and pissing around, and gossiping, and winding each other up. Then we go do the show, and afterwards we go out drinking together. So we are all together for like, almost 15/20 hour periods non-stop together. There’s that esprit de corps, you know.
“Most people watch light entertainment shows for company. They want to get laughs out of it – they would love to have a laugh – but really why they’re watching is they want to see people enjoying themselves and enjoying each other’s company, and they like that rapport. And that’s why I like doing it, you know. I mean, there’s so many … as you know, man, show business is as they say, it’s a sharp-elbowed game. Do you know what I mean?
“And fame and success, it can bring out the greed in people and it can bring out the nasty side in people. But that’s never been the case on The Panel. It has always been just … if anything, with time, our affections for each other have sort of grown. And our professional creative trust in each other has grown."

Showbiz might be a “sharp-elbowed game,” but Maxwell maintains that he’s on friendly terms with most of his fellow travellers on the international comedy circuit. However, he’s reluctant to single out any one individual as a particular influence.
“I’ve been in the business since I was 17 so I’ve just got a lot of mates. I wouldn’t say there was any one particular person, but it would just be the general – like I said – the esprit de corps of the game, you know. It’s an incredibly convivial life. We’re largely all friends with each other. Ranging from best mates/bosom buddies through to just work colleagues that you just have a great fuckin’ time with when you bump into them. But I think that’s it really, you know what I mean? And that outlook – that way of looking at show business – comes from The Comedy Cellar.”
Although based in London, Maxwell spends a lot of time in his homeland each year – either through work commitments or just visiting family and friends.
“I do most of my work in Ireland at two sort of times of year; in the autumn, and in the spring. I usually do a tour in the spring in Ireland. And I usually do TV stuff, and various bits and pieces in the autumn. And this time of year is when we start gearing up for Altitude – my comedy festival in the Alps. So, this year, March 23 is when we’re starting for four days.”
How did it come about that a comedian from Killbarrack founded a comedy festival in the Swiss Alps?
“How it came about was, when I was 18, all my mates moved to Munich. Do you remember? Are you of the same vintage? That was the ‘90s, like. Everybody was living in Munich. Well, all my mates were out there, and I used to go out, and I had moved to London, and I would go out and visit them, we just decide to go up into the mountains and do some snowboarding one day, after a three-day fuckin’ binge!
“And that’s how it started, man. I was instantly fuckin’ hooked. So I got … over the last 10 years I have got about 30 comedians into snowboarding. I got them all hooked. Including [English comedian] Marcus Brigstocke. And Marcus went away with his missus – Marcus kind of grew up in that world – and he made contact with what became our future business partner, Richard Melville, and through the two of them we started just a series of gigs in bars which we still run. That’s how the festival kind of came out with just the regular tours.
“You know, we’ve done the tours for seven/eight seasons now. And we started Altitude two years ago. Next spring will be the third festival. I mean, there’s not many people would attempt to start a comedy festival on top of a fucking mountain, at the height of the biggest recession for 70 years, but that’s the sort of idiots we are, man. You know, it’s a lot of fun. But that’s basically – long story short – that’s the sort of thing that’s going on right now. A staggering statistic is that between 60-70% of all winter ski holidays are actually booked in October. So for the festival, you’ve got to get your shit right. Every year we put on a comedy gig at the ski show in Earl’s Court here in London, and that’s on October 22, so we’re gearing up towards that right now.”

From snow to thin ice. Although Maxwell has mostly avoided controversy throughout his career, he recently came in for an avalanche of criticism over here following a disastrous appearance at the Carlsberg Comedy Festival at the end of July. Having staggered onstage obviously drunk at the Iveagh Gardens, he blanked out and had to abandon his set after 10 painfully unfunny minutes. Although he offered to either reimburse fans or give them free tickets to an upcoming Vicar St. Show, many punters complained to Joe Duffy’s Liveline (he himself refused to go on the show to apologise).
Maxwell cringes when I bring it up. “Mate, it just … you know. I was genuinely baffled that it went any further. We had already set up a thing with Aiken’s that there would be a remuneration thing, or people could get tickets to my next show which is in Vicar St. on the 25th of October. And I put out a public apology, and I thought that was that, you know.”
He’s in no doubt as to why the story went further. “There’s a lot of sleeveen fucks in Ireland, as you well know. It has always been the way, you know, it’s like what Yeats wrote about, ‘greasy fingers in the till,’ man. There’s a lot of mediocrity in Ireland, and there’s a lot of hypocrisy in Ireland, and there’s a lot of just genuinely nasty bastards with their reins on the horse in Ireland. And I knew that, sooner or later, I’d do something that would fuck up and they’d have a crack at me. You know? I knew that was going to happen one way or the other. I got up the next day… well, actually I didn’t get up the next day, I cried all night, man.”
Did you seriously cry that night? I mean, were you that upset about it?
“Yeah, I was very upset, man. I mean, I was very confused as well. I had never blanked out on stage before. And it was very frightening, baffling, and upsetting for me. But mostly upsetting because I knew that these people had come along and they wanted me to make them laugh, and feel some release and joy and happiness, and that’s what I love to do. And I failed to do the job. And, you know, it was nightmarish.
“But I got up the next day and I did my gig, man. And it was weird on stage at the end of the gig because it was on in the afternoon. So I was still feeling physically fuckin’ ropey, let alone emotionally, you know. And at the end of the gig I thanked the audience and I went, ‘Actually you’ve been great. I’ve got to say, I was on stage here last night and I made a cunt of myself’.
“And loads of people around the room went, ‘We know!’ And I went, ‘How do you know?’ And they went, ‘We were there’. And I was like, ‘And you came back?’ And somebody shouted, ‘We love you, Maxwell!’ And everybody cheered. And I was like fuckin’ choking back the tears, man. And then these two big goons, pissed up lads from Donegal who’d been making trouble all night in the gig, jumped up on stage and gave me a group hug. You know what I mean? So I think the people who dig me will understand everybody’s gone into work a little bit fucked at some point.”
Did the incident make you question your drinking habits?
“No. Not at all.”
Would you say you’re a heavy drinker?
“No. Not at all. I’m an Irish drinker. I was on holidays in my homeland at a comedy festival that’s sponsored by a drinks company. And I don’t think there was anything to it other than that, you know. I literally had one too fuckin’ many. I should have held off on my last drink and waited until after the gig. It has never happened before, mate. And I have been on stage in all sorts of existential states, let’s just put it like that. And it has been a fantastic time. It could have happened at any time in my career. It could have happened at any fuckin’ place, where, you know, I just blanked out. Everything was dark, and it was quite horrifying and upsetting. And it was really weird, but it was really quite fuckin’ strange that it was taken up in the way that it was – by a radio show that usually harasses petrol stations!”

Staying on the subject of comedic controversy, Tommy Tiernan recently found himself in seriously hot water over some supposedly anti-Semitic remarks made during a public interview with this writer in the Hot Press Chatroom at the Electric Picnic. What’s Maxwell’s take on that incident?
“I don’t want to fuckin’ put my oar into Tommy’s shit, man,” he says. “But from my point of view, it’s just a colossal storm in a teacup. Tommy loves surfing around on the edge of a theme and trying to pull out the cant and hypocrisy from it, and just illuminate it. And when you’re playing with those sort of things, when you’re playing with fire, and you’re trying to create more light than heat, occasionally you’re going to get your fingers burnt, because people who want to bring you down are going to misrepresent you, and deliberately try and fuck it up.
“But I think Tommy is a talented enough artist, and he has built up enough reputation and love in Ireland that he’ll get past this. But as far as the idea that he’s an anti-Semite, I mean, dear God – shut the fuck up! There’s a colossal amount of vested interest to keep people focussing on an appalling crime that happened a long time ago, as opposed to an appalling crime that is happening right now. Alan Shatter has made an ass of himself, but he’s a mediocre politician. I mean, I don’t even feel that angry at Alan Shatter for getting his oar in, mate. I guess, from Alan Shatter’s perspective, if he hadn’t said something, how is he going to look in temple the next week? So I doubt if Alan Shatter really believes that Tommy is anti-Semitic, you know.”
Unfortunately for Tommy, the way this story has travelled around the world, many people now wrongly believe that he is. . .
“Yeah, maybe. I hope there’s no long term repercussions for him. I mean, at the end of the day, Tommy loves to shock. And he loves to be outrageous, and you know, eventually like … Tommy’s big in Ireland, but he ain’t shit compared to the Israeli-American lobby, man. They’re by far the most powerful fuckin’ lobby in Washington, and they watch all media, and they cover everything, you know. And there’s various other organisations [like] the Anti-Inflammatory League that do the same.
“You know, I mean clearly Tommy is not an anti-Semite. It’s fucking nonsense. But it is that rolling news-world that we live in, and Ireland has a lot of talk radio, which fuels us. And they have to talk about something, so if a comedian gets drunk on stage, or … actually in some ways it’s sort of a compliment to the cultural clout that our really low-brow art form has gained in Ireland. Or perhaps it’s a sad indictment, by the fact that so much of, you know, some layers of Irish society have so fucking collapsed that people are actually listening to the clown! Do you know what I mean? Quite simply, if Tommy was a British comedian and he had said that, he would have got nothing. Not because British people are more anti-Semitic, it’s just that the comedian is further down the fuckin’ food chain.”
Do you consider comedy to be a low-brow art form?
“Yeah, of course it is!” he laughs. “And I’m proud of that. I certainly believe there’s no point in being great unless you can reach the stupidest fuck in the room. That is the problem with most ‘culture’. It’s mouldering away in museums or art galleries or fuckin’ various opera houses throughout the world. Unless you’re reaching people, what’s the point of it? What is the currency of it? What’s the value of it?
“You know, comedians can get up on stage anywhere. People are a lot brighter than they’re taken for. That’s why I still do the clubs. I was on stage last night out in a big club in South London, and mostly it’s geezers, you know. You just get a lot of geezers, cab drivers, those sort of geezers. And you can approach them, you can talk to them about heavy and deep stuff – they get it. But just make it funny. You know what I mean? I firmly believe the comedian has to go to the mountain, not the other way around.”
Is there any subject that Maxwell considers to be off-limits in comedy?
“Nothing funny is off-limits in comedy, man. You know, if you can make it funny then you can say it. Right? That is the joy of the parameters of comedy, you know. If you can make it funny – then it’s funny. That’s yours. No disrespect to you, Olaf – comedians get asked this question all the time and it’s just baffling for us, you know. There are no off-limits.
“And it’s weird the way, genuinely after gigs you might feel you really pushed the boundaries of some taboo or anything like that – often genuinely when you get people who are spitting feathers, are fucking outraged with you after a gig, then you’ll think, ‘Fuck! Maybe it was that new paedophile stuff I did. Or maybe it was that stuff about the fuckin’ holocaust’. No! It’ll be, ‘What the FUCK did you say about CATS?!’ You know what I mean? You literally cannot legislate for what will offend people. It’s just another note on the instrument.”
How do you mean?
“Sometimes you want to do some silly, light-hearted stuff. Sometimes, the audience, you feel they want more edge to what you’re doing. And there can be a change in the tune or even the way you present it. Sometimes you can be a bit more scowly, and stalking the stage, and be more exclamatory in the way you are doing it. Sometimes you sit on the stool and you breathe in-and-out, and you relax and you are whimsical and giggly. And that’s the way comedians look at it, you know. Comedians never look at what the fuck’s off limits. Comedians only care about one thing – making people laugh. So if you can make it funny, that’s it.”
Has a gag ever gotten you into trouble?
“No, not to my knowledge. I’m sure I’ve upset people over the years, people have walked out, but you can’t legislate for that. Even when somebody’s walked out of gigs you don’t know why they’re walking out. It could be anything. Do you know what I mean?”

Although Andrew Maxwell is very proud to be an Irishman, he doesn’t view this country through rose-tinted glasses. Far from it...
“Well, it’s just incompetence, isn’t it?” he sighs, when asked for his opinion about the current state of political affairs. “I mean, we’ve been led by deceivers, the greedy, and incompetent pigs since partition. Simple as that. James Connolly, who my great-grandfather was best mates with – the two of them moved from Edinburgh to Dublin together – you know, he said it: ‘Partition will unleash a carnival of reaction’. So what you’ve ended up having is the worst possible Prods ruling the people up north, and the worst possible Catholics ruling people down south.
“There was that sort of thing with the Ryan Report and all the rest of it, you know. They owe us at least a billion, man. And Michael Woods’ fuckin’ deal of, ‘Oh don’t worry about it, just give us €80 million’. That’s not acceptable to me, because pretty much any time anybody has ever threatened you on the street late at night – all that fuckin’ rich vault of self-hatred in Ireland – you can guarantee most of that came from the hands of the church. They owe us, man. They owe us. In the quite crude words of the street, man, ‘Fuck you – pay me!’
“By all accounts – even now with the recession and the collapse of property values – the Catholic Church still owns something like two billion euros worth of property in Ireland. Do you know what I mean? Pay us! Pay us for all the collapsed marriages; pay us for the fuckin’ teenage suicides, man. It all fuckin’ stems from this organisation. And that’s only the Catholic Church.”
Having said all that, he’s undeniably a patriot with a deep love for his homeland.
“I love my country intensely,” he declares, “and the only two things I have ever advertised before are Ireland and Aer Lingus. And I advertised Aer Lingus to try and keep it out of the hands of that fuckin’ maggot from fuckin’ Westmeath, man. Do you know what I mean? I did a series of ads for Discover Ireland... It’s an amazing country, it’s very amusing to me. You know, per capita it’s a far more funny country than anywhere else I’ve ever been to.
“It’s absurd, it’s ridiculous, and it’s just genuinely a funny place. Funny shit will happen. I did the tour earlier on in the sort of early summer/late spring, and you know, by the end of it there was an extra 20 minutes. Most of it I couldn’t use anywhere else, because nobody would understand it outside of Ireland. Shit is so absurd in Ireland. If you try and do it onstage anywhere else, people are like, ‘Ah you’re puttin’ it on, man’.
“And, you know, from that side of it – from a professional and creative side – I love Ireland. So, on a personal side, you know, I get to live outside it but I am home at least once a week. I mean, I’m not at the moment – as I already told you I’m working on Altitude – but once The Panel starts up I’ll be in once a week, and that will go on for months on end. I’m still best mates with the mates I grew up with. So when I come home, life just resumes. In my head, I have never really been away.
“I have the luxury to not have to deal on a daily basis with the crass and incompetent bastards that run the place. So I get to come in and enjoy it. And I think that would be, for me, the best luxury of Ireland – is that I just get to enjoy the fucker; get a map out and travel around the country. I mean, it is a staggeringly beautiful country. Unbelievably cool. You know what I mean? You get to fall in love with it over and over again. But the other side of that is there are some deeply sinister people that would cross the road to try and break your heart. And I think that is the constant tension within the soul of Ireland: Are the good people willing to stand up to the scum? Do you know what I mean?”

Is Andrew Maxwell prone to melancholia or bouts of depression?
“Well, I don’t think so. No more than anybody else. I’d be lying to you if I [said] I don’t get the blues sometimes, but I think that’s native to the human condition, is it not?”
I’m just thinking of the ‘tears of a clown’ syndrome. . .
“I’ll reply by quoting another comedian who was asked this. I remember listening to this audio interview years ago, with Jerry Seinfeld, who was asked the very same thing. And Seinfeld said, ‘Well, I think it’s more that there’s that journalistic sting to it’. You know what I mean? ‘Clown with a frown’. ‘Tart with a heart’. He goes, ‘Nobody gives a fuck how the man who’s driving the bread truck in the morning is feeling!’ Nobody gives a shit. It just has a ring to it, it scans, doesn’t it: ‘He makes everybody laugh, but inside he is sad’. You know, everybody gets down, everybody gets the blues.”
Hmmm . . . he delivers the bread, but inside he’s dead!
“Boom!” he laughs. “There ya are! So I don’t think so. It’s just those things, it’s journalistic, and it’s also when they make TV movies about famous British comedians they always emphasise that side of their nature, because it journalistically rubs, doesn’t it? You can sum it up, it’s a heart-breaking scene: he takes his bow, a thousand people laugh at his final punch-line. He bows. Everybody cheers. There’s a standing ovation. Hurrah! But as he steps from the light, his face falls. It just scans, man. But, to be honest, like, no more than anybody else. Maybe. I don’t know. I certainly don’t feel that I am. You know, in that sort of way I look at my job like it’s a job. Do you know what I mean? I try not to whinge too much.”
Final question, do you have a guiding philosophy in life, or a motto?
“Well, I don’t know, man. I suppose I do, but nothing’s tripping off the tongue. I think it’s that sort of fuckin’ thing if you’re a comedian you have to remember you’re the joke, right? And, you know, gratitude is the main fuckin’ thing in life. What profits the man who inherits the Earth, but loses his soul, you know? You’ve got to enjoy it along the way. Spread the love. And not to take it too seriously, don’t take yourself too seriously.
“I mean, there is an enormous amount of relief to be had in knowing that eventually your daftness will all come to nothing!” he laughs. “I don’t find that depressing, the idea that there’s no cartoonish vision of an afterlife, that there is a final curtain, there is a final bow. It only makes me appreciate life more, and enjoy it more.”

Andrew Maxwell is one of the stars of the Galway Comedy Festival, which takes place in a number of different venues in Galway, from October 21 to 25. He also plays Vicar St., Dublin (24) and the Sky Venue, Portlaoise (26).