Before Jason Byrne turned 50 last month he was planning to go to Belgium for three days. Instead he tested positive for Covid and spent his birthday in bed. He was physically fine — vaccinated and, as he puts it, additionally inoculated by a misspent childhood spent “rolling around in shite, licking rats and climbing trees” — but Byrne was upset that his half-century celebration had to be curtailed.
After his medical shenanigans in 2021, though, the comedian wasn’t about to grumble. Last September Byrne was jogging in Portmarnock when he felt a pain in his heart. An angiogram procedure revealed three blockages in his coronary arteries, and doctors inserted stents to keep them open. His condition resulted from high cholesterol, which he thinks was probably hereditary. “The doctor said I could have been eating fish heads all my life and that cholesterol could not have been stopped, so I’m on cholesterol tablets now for life.”
Despite a tough few years the comedian seems in fine fettle when we talk. Like most stand-up comedians his livelihood took a huge hit during the pandemic. He has sought therapy to alleviate “mental fatigue” and, in early 2020, his father died from a stroke. “Fortunately we Irish find humour in misery,” he tells me. “If we hear some sort of miserable story we will laugh at first, then go, ‘Oh shit, I shouldn’t laugh at that.’” By way of example he tells me about the flood of well-wishing texts and messages he received after his heart operation. One woman wrote to say her husband also had stents. The surgery was successful, she explained, but then he got brain tumours and died. “Get well soon!” she wrote at the end of the note.
Byrne’s health issues necessitated a recalibration of his lifestyle. Not only has he cut out salt, pizzas, burgers and chips, after 24 years of relentless touring he’s also cutting back on live shows. “At the age of 50, having the stents and everything, I can’t physically gig at the level I was at. It’s just too much,” he says. Byrne recently cancelled a tour of Australia after the outbreak of war in Ukraine. “If anything happens, if Putin makes another move, if air spaces close, I could get stuck in Australia for months. I hate cancelling because I love going over there.”
If all this sounds as though the comedian is winding down to retirement, you’re wrong. He has written four episodes of Story Bud, a new RTE Player show for kids that puts an anarchic twist on classic fairytales. Byrne presents three of the shows, which include animated sequences. The brief, he explains, was to “go as mad as you can, but keep the frame of the story”. His yarns include The Elves and the Loo Maker, Cinderella’s Other Fella and a version of Hansel and Gretel in which the siblings are tortured by a wicked stepmother with a bread fetish.
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Byrne’s surreal and silly approach works for adults too. “I have a huge imagination, and I always did as a kid,” he says. “So Story Bud is perfect for me. I’ve done so many things in my career — Royal Variety Shows, I’ve gigged in Jakarta — but this is my favourite yet.”
Byrne is not exactly out of his comfort zone here. Since 2018 he has written three books for children, titled The Accidental Adventures of Onion O’Brien, which he describes as an Irish take on the Famous Five or Hardy Boys. The adventures were inspired by his own experiences as a child, which he mapped in the memoir Adventures of a Wonky-Eyed Boy (2016).
“I grew up in Ballinteer at the base of the Dublin Mountains. We’d go up into Marlay Park and from there into Ticknock. We’d leave in the morning and stay up there all day. There could be 20 to 30 or us because I lived on a housing estate in Ludford, where my books are set, with every generation of child on the road.”
Byrne describes his younger self as a “messer” who wore a giant crucifix around his neck at school to wind up his maths teacher, a nun. A love of silly props and absurd routines continued into his career as a stand-up comedian. His live shows are frenetic, as he drags members of the audience on to the stage and incorporates props such as rubber ducks, squeeze boxes, UV guns and funfair high strikers. “I’d fix massive latex hands, with a little microphone on the palm, on to poles. I’d stick them into the faces of punters in the audience and interview them. I used to do magic stunts with boxes: really shit magical illusions. I’d put them online and magicians would get in contact with me to say they were disgraceful.”
Byrne has always been a multitasker. He acted in Father Ted, hosted three series of his own show for BBC Radio 2, presented comedy chat and panel shows including The Jason Byrne Show and The Byrne Ultimatum, and was a judge on Ireland’s Got Talent alongside Louis Walsh. He’s appearing on RTE 2 in Clear History, a comedy panel show about “owning your shame”. He shrugs. “Comedians are able to do a lot — radio, TV, writing children’s books, so many things.”
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An attempt to make his own sitcom, however, was a disaster. He wrote Father Figure (2013) for the BBC as a dark comedy about a man who loses his wife and has to raise his kids as a single parent. The show’s producers, keen to replicate the success of Mrs Brown’s Boys, put it in front of a “happy-clappy” audience and turned it into something unrecognisable, he claims. “All of a sudden my wife has a job and I’m a stay-at-home dad. I knew it was going to be cancelled when I saw the first episode.”
The comedian insists he has learnt from such mistakes. He is adapting his Onion O’Brien books for the screen and wants to collaborate with like-minded souls this time. He’s hoping to do more episodes of Story Bud and a second memoir. Despite his ageing and his ailments, he’s not turning his back on stand-up comedy either. At last year’s Edinburgh festival, when he couldn’t get members of the audience on stage due to Covid restrictions, he presented a show using a projector and slides.
“I realised I could stay in one spot. The whole show naturally slowed down and the crowd loved it. I got standing ovations every night. I was going, ‘Have I been jumping around for no reason for 20 years?’ My stand-up has always been connected to how I’m living my life, and right now I have to slow down.”
He’s planning to incorporate the physical and emotional heartbreak from the past two years into a new show about his late father. “My dad used to sit in his shed with his whiskey and his fags and his amazing knowledge,” he says. “The show is mixed in with my dad’s story of growing up.”
Byrne believes that children’s imaginations are often squashed in school. “ ‘Don’t be thinking that,’ teachers tell kids. ‘That’s silly.’ ‘Don’t be daydreaming.’ I think I was able to keep my imagination, my fun child brain. Somehow I was allowed to keep it going and ended up using it in my work.”
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Life may have taken dramatic turns for the comedian, but the wonky-eyed boy has lost nothing of his childish enthusiasm.
Story Bud is on RTE Player from Friday
