Byrne Baby Byrne

Over the past five years, Jason Byrne has carved an interesting niche for himself in the modern humour milieu. Less abrasive than Daniel Kitson, less self-consciously ironic than David O’Doherty, less irritating than approximately 90% of stand-ups currently operating in North America, Byrne’s brand of madcap physical comedy owes more to old-school slapstick merchants like Mel Brooks and Leslie Nielsen than it does to the wilfully obtuse, arch post-modernism favoured by contemporaries such as Noble & Silver.

“Well, it’s interesting you should say that,” says Byrne, speaking down the line from Edinburgh, “because when I started out, my influences were people like Tommy Cooper – hardly the current curriculum. But I think in his own way, Cooper was actually quite a risky performer – he wasn’t afraid to play around with the audience’s expectations. But it definitely wasn’t until I discovered someone like, say, Bill Hicks that I realised the extent to which you could be simultaneously funny and evil.
“Overall, though, I’d agree that my roots are very much in that tradition of farce. I’d actually love to do a Jim Carrey-type movie along the lines of Ace Ventura – I love silly shit. There are too many people up on their high horses, saying ‘Oh, this is fucking stupid’. Of course it is! But it works because he’s such a funny fucker; he’s just that bloke in your class who would not stop messing. And I think that physical kind of comedy is what I’m best at. I mean, I should have been in The Naked Gun!”
One thing’s for sure – if Byrne is dissatisfied at the extent to which he has diversified over the years, it hasn’t been for the want of trying. A cursory glance at his CV reveals a highly impressive range of multi-media activity, veering from supporting roles in feature films, sitcoms and radio programmes, to stints as sketch-writer, voice-over artist, chat-show host, and even circus ringmaster!
“That was quite scary,” Jason recalls. “I was interviewing this mad French circus, and they were all really hardcore, fuckin’ mad circus-heads who just do not live anywhere except in the big-top. Then there was the woman who had a body like a bloke and a little tiny head – she was like something out of Men In Black 2! I also had to go do a trapeze act, and what happened was that when I was put up into the ceiling on the trapeze wires, my safety net was a bloke standing on the ground with a rope attached to my hip. So I was literally living on the edge, but in the end I really got into it and it turned to be quite an enjoyable experience.”
Byrne, of course, also found time to develop a separate solo project with RTE. A bizarre mish-mash of sketches, improv, stand-up and painfully awkward guest interviews, The Jason Byrne Show became yet another in the long line of promising comedy programmes to fall foul of the Montrose mafia’s notoriously amateurish approach to the genre.
Though Byrne remains largely philosophical over the whole affair (viewing it as a valuable learning experience above all else) he’s nonetheless unafraid to offer some forthright views on where the national broadcaster is going wrong with its humour output.
“It’s just very, very hard to make your ideas work in RTE,” he explains. “The atmosphere in there is not particularly conducive to creativity, ‘cos everyone’s afraid they’re gonna lose their fuckin’ job. In fairness, I couldn’t have gone in there at a worse time, because they were sacking people left, right and centre, so nobody really took an interest in our show or encouraged us what in what we were trying to do.
“I think what people are gonna have to do is follow the example of Bachelor’s Walk – you have the make the show outside the influence of RTE, you have to complete the whole process with them nowhere near you. Otherwise, all that other shit – the power struggles, the backbiting, the internal politics – will fucking kill it stone dead. Then there’s also the matter of scheduling, resources etc. I mean, on The Jason Byrne Show, our director was doubling as the producer and the editor, and we were filming two shows a day, which in London is fucking unheard of!
“The whole experience was a very steep learning curve, but I did take some really important lessons out of it. If I was to make that show now, I’d know exactly what elements to change, which people to work with, who to avoid etc etc.”
Meantime, when not working on the pilot of a warped new gameshow for the BBC (“It’s called I Hate, and it’s a completely miserable quiz about the annoying parts of everyday life,” he notes, with some relish), Byrne shall continue to plough his own highly individual comedic furrow.
“I really like to keep it interesting for myself,” he asserts. “ I mean, just the other night, at Late And Live here in Edinburgh, I wrestled David O’Doherty whilst covered in bubblewrap. Daniel Kitson gave a running commentary, and the story he concocted was that Dave had a grudge against me, because I’d killed his father, who was made out of helium. Now, sadly, Dave won – he climbed up on a monitor and executed a body slam – but I gave as good as I got. It’s hard to think of any other occupation where such behaviour is not only tolerated, but actually encouraged… except for wrestling, obviously.”

Jason Byrne plays Vicar St. in Dublin on September 7