Jason Byrne is what happens when a full grown man unapologetically embraces his inner child.
Jason Byrne is what happens when a full grown man unapologetically embraces his inner child. Combining visual spectacles of infectious nonsense with chaos, bedlam and anarchy, somewhere in the whole hilarious debacle is the shouted stand-up of this crazed Irishman, making for unique and unforgettable comedy. It’s also made him one of the consistently highest selling acts in the history of the Edinburgh Fringe festival.
When he speaks with Beat, he’s just arrived in Australia earlier that day and he apologises for his “complete fuckin’ bonkers head on me because I’m totally jetlagged”. He’s brought with him his new show, Cirque Du Byrne, which he’ll be performing as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and elsewhere around the country. “Basically, because I’ve always done stunts in my shows with punters, that’s all it is. It’s not me coming in fucking somersaulting,” he says of the “cirque” part of his show title.
He does, however, enter skipping. He’s also using the show as an “excuse for me to wear a nice jacket” and the stage is “all dressed really nice”. He’s also asking for audience members to bring gifts to the show. Gifts that he can keep. “At my shows in Britain, without me asking anybody, they started bringing me weird shit and leaving it on the stage, because they know that I can improvise so well,” says Byrne, who will be writing his sitcom for BBC while here. One guy gave him a pair of jocks “with a cactus on the front where the willy goes and my face on the arse” he says. Another gave him “a weird little hand knitted Santa from Mexico so people are just bringing shit that has the best stories attached to them”.
Cirque Du Byrne, more of an “event” than a standard show, he says, will also include a few dubious nods to the circus arts: he’s promising a “shit acrobat group”, freaks and spinning plates. “I’m saying all this shit but it’s all my version of it, you know what I mean?” he says. In case you don’t know what he means, he explains how the spinning plates will work, and in doing so, a little bit of his onstage energy is reflected in the way these words just hurtle out of his mouth.
“A punter gets dragged up on stage, I throw plates at them, they put the plates up onto the sticks, they try and spin them, they can’t spin them, then they have to throw the plates at me and then I just bounce them on top of the sticks,” he says, without pausing for breath, “then the punter gets back in his seat, then he gets back up on stage, I then put little sticks in his hands and his mouth and balance little plates on his mouth and on his hands and then I play his balls with xylophone sticks.”
He’s quick to clarify that last part. When he says balls, he does indeed mean testicles. “I don’t hit ‘em hard, like, I just tap ‘em,” he says.
Jason Byrne performs Cirque Du Byrne at The Athenaeum Theatre from March 29 – April 24. It’s at 8.30pm Tuesday – Saturday and 7.30pm on Sundays. Tickets are $32 – $38 and available through Ticketmaster online, 1300 660 013, 9650 1500 and at the door.
