Head in the Clouds Jason Byrne Press Pack Interview

If you’re the kind of comedian who thrives on chaotic audience interaction, as Jason Byrne clearly does, how do you decide who to select from the crowd?

Well, for starters, you’re probably going to go for someone sitting near the front as, by now, those are the punters who’ll know there’s a good chance of them getting involved in his high-energy shows. He tends also to pick men, because their ineptitude at following instructions makes things even more entertaining.

“Every time I’ve picked a woman they’ve done what I’ve asked them perfectly,” says Byrne on the eve of his new Edinburgh Festival Fringe show – and subsequent tour – Head in the Clouds. “When a man does it, he’s often facing the wrong way, he doesn’t know what I’m saying, he’s gone off and come back. Men between the ages of 30 and 60 are normally so used to being guided by their wives that they don’t know what they’re doing. Once this guy couldn’t hear what I was saying because his wife had forgotten to give him his hearing aid – to actually put them in his ears for him.”

Byrne says the name for the new show comes from him having got lost in his own imagination as a kid. “The teachers would tell me I had my head in the clouds,” he says. “I was obviously creating my own little world, and they were always telling me to stop daydreaming and go back to maths.”

It’s something he spoke about with the late Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney, whose teachers would regularly reprimand him for favouring scribbling away over following the rules. Imagine the art that would’ve been lost had those types of teachers had succeeded in beating the dreams out of kids like that.

Byrne’s on a mission to get adults to enjoy the giddiness of mucking around – the sort of ridiculous fun you used to see on Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s shows, such as fruit being tromboned off people’s heads.

“I’m not talking about things like office team building, which is horrendous. Nobody likes that,” says the Dubliner who’s the biggest selling comedian at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “This is just me orchestrating a silly night with some nice bits of stand-up.”

One of the stunts he’s got planned for this tour occurred to him after he received a shipment of clouds that he’d ordered from Temu. He put one on his head and, looking in the mirror, was reminded of Jamiroquai, so of course he started dancing. It got him thinking about the Virtual Insanity video and how that might be recreated on the (comically) cheap. Without wanting to give too much away, just know it’s going to involve sheets of lino and enthusiastic but baffled participation, and might well result in Byrne falling over.

In recent years Byrne’s been saying he’s got to be less physical on stage than he used to. He does, after all, now have six stents in his body and is supposed to be taking things a bit more easy. But, although what he’s doing now is less dangerous than what he’s done in the past (such as swinging on a mock wrecking ball in white vest and pants in 2013/14), he’s never going to be the sort of comic who stands behind a microphone stand for the whole show.

In last year’s outing, called No Show as it was largely improvised, he only really did one big bit of physical comedy, and that was miming the guy who works on the waltzers at the fair ground – walking around the stage backwards. Simple but hilarious.

One of the ideas he’s playing with for the new show is a sort of acknowledgement of the multi-generational appeal of his comedy. “I hate the way younger people get dissed for being on their phones,” he says, after underlining how much he likes seeing all ages in his audience. “I always say that if we had phones in the 1980s we’d have been on the phones! We wouldn’t have been saying, ‘I’m not going on the phone, oh no, I’m going to build a raft or a fire.’ We’d have been holding those things and going: ‘LOOK AT THIS!’”

So, again, without wanting to give too much away, he’ll be calling a few younger people up on stage and getting them to guess the purpose of certain now obsolete objects from the 1980s and 90s. This will all happen while somebody else does something ridiculously distracting (and specific) in the background. It’s all carefully planned chaos.

Byrne doesn’t really have a problem with hecklers; if anything, his biggest on-stage challenges have involved audience members wanting to join in, but that always ends up in a fun time for everyone. On the odd occasion when someone isn’t being terribly nice, he has in the past had a brilliantly creative way of dealing with it.

He used to have Deal or No Deal-type boxes across the back of the stage, and when someone was giving him a hard time he’d say: “Ah, let’s not fight. Do you want to win some money?” They’d always say yes, and when they picked their number he’d open the corresponding box to reveal the word, “c**t”.  Byrne never uses that word on stage, so the effect is always jaw-dropping.

He’s had audience members heckle each other, though. Once, a Londoner described himself as a “building manager” and a Scot at the back of the auditorium said: “Ah, he’s a janny.”

“I was confused so I asked what that is,” he recalls. “A Scottish lady said: ‘A janny is a janny.’ Then another woman stood up and went, ‘Janitor, Jason. She’s trying to say janitor.’ I went: ‘Oh, who are you?” and she went, ‘I’m a protestant,’ and sat down. The crowd were killing themselves.”

As well as putting together Head in the Clouds, Byrne is currently working on an animation project which he hopes will be a sort of Irish version of The Simpsons. Based on Paddy Lama, his play about his late father, it’s an adult, 1980s/90s-set sitcom about an Irish family. It’s being developed with Boulder Media, who make cult shows like Captain Fall and Grimsburg. Some of the people behind Rick & Morty are involved, and if it gets financed and commissioned, Byrne will do some of the voices, alongside a few well-known actors.

In the meantime, though, he’s working on the finishing touches of Head in the Clouds, and trying to anticipate how long various stunts will take. He recently watched a Youtube video about the 1974 World Diddling Championships (all about the art of making Celtic-sounding musical noises with one’s mouth, and known variously as “fiddling” or “lilting” in Ireland) and can’t stop thinking about how funny it is.

“You sometimes have men in a pub with no talent, no ability to sing, and the whole place goes quiet while they start going ‘fiddledee-dee’. The reason they do it is the English took our instruments off us hundreds of years ago,” he laughs, hinting at some comical onstage retribution being planned.

At a time when grim news is around every corner, it’s the kind of silly fun we could all do with. As he puts it: “In case World War III starts it’ll be really good if I get the show in just before then.”

Jason Byrne: Head in the Clouds, Assembly Hall, 1-24 Aug (not 11, 18), preview 31 Jul, two-for-one 4-5 Aug; UK tour 25 Sep-30 Nov, jasonbyrne.ie