What are your impressions of Oz?
I love it! There’s a kind of wildness to Australia that’s very accommodating to Irish people. There’s a kind of lunacy that is permissible, and that Irish people are very at home with.

Ireland has been in a touch of strife recently. You said that you’re all secretly delighted with the employment situation. How are you coping with the “collapsing economy” situation? Is there any secret delight?
There was a woman on the radio on one of the call-in shows — it was very good. We had our budget recently, where the government lays out the economic terms of the next 12 months, and they’ve cut all kinds of social welfare for all sorts of different people. And this woman comes on and says, “I’m a widow, and like all other widows, after this budget, I’ve been left in No Man’s Land.” It was great.

Ireland’s largest export, Irish pubs, seem to be doing quite well still…
The funny thing is, when we had lots of money and we were the most successful economy in Europe, alcohol consumption went up. And now that we have no money, alcohol consumption has gone up.

Are there any Irish pubs left in Ireland? We seem to have most of them over here…
Pubs are actually emigrating. They’re taking the plane to Australia. I’m sure if you go to Melbourne or Sydney airport, in the immigration queue, as well as people, you’re bound to see four or five pubs as well.

You once did stand-up for 36 hours to set a Guinness record — how did you manage that?
The funny thing about it was that it was last Easter in a place in Galway called Nun’s Island. Like “n-u-n”, the small holy women. And the gig was next door to an enclosed order of silent nuns. In the space of 150 yards, you had the most serene, divine, calm, contemplative women. And on the far side of the wall was an unshaven, rambling bandit of the imagination, and I thought the two together must have made somebody laugh, somewhere.

Especially with your record attempt straddling the Resurrection…
Exactly. I started at 3pm on Good Friday and went until just before dawn on Easter Sunday. It was a great experience, and I very much enjoyed it. The whole idea of it was that I was tired of the style I was doing stand-up in, which had become very shouty. I went, “I’m stuck in this rut of shouting now.” It’s kind of like Hitler wanting to do a jazz album. I’d had enough of shouting and I wanted to do something softer. I thought I would ramble into a new persona. It didn’t happen immediately. I woke up the next morning and went, “Oh, shit. What a f**king waste of time.” But, over the next couple of months, my style absolutely started to change. 

Did you get heckled three jokes in and go, “Here we go: another 35-and-a-half hours of this”?
The worst experience I had was after 33 hours, which was about 3am, and I’d wandered into a very vulnerable state of being. My defences were well gone. They’d had enough and packed up and gone home for the night, so I really couldn’t handle any hecklers. I didn’t have anything to say to them. You know sometimes when… say, you meet a girl, you might say something that you think is funny to her — you might look at her hair and say, “Did you come into town on a bicycle?” and she just looks at you and starts crying. She can’t defend herself. She just starts weeping. But other girls, or even the same girl at another time, would just punch you or say something funny back. But on this particular evening, she just starts to cry and you think, “Oh my God...” That was me! A crowd of drunks came in, and my wife had come to see that session, and I couldn’t handle them. All I could do was look at my wife. Obviously I couldn’t ask her for help, but I could try to passive-aggressively suggest that she should be helping without speaking to her. And she actually stood up and said, “He’s my husband, please leave him alone.”

Now you’ve been accused of anti-Semitism, but you’ve also said you want to emulate Lenny Bruce…
That was a complete and utter stitch-up by some Irish newspapers that were absolutely sent out to get me, and dig something up — it’s kind of an ironic phrase to use, but “let’s crucify him”. If I’d said something about Nigerians or Albanians, there would have been no traction on it. It was a stitch-up, completely. Ireland is a very small country, and there isn’t that much going on. There’s so many newspapers to fill, there’s so many hours of radio to fill, that if you can provide a story for someone for a few days, they’re delighted, because they have something to talk about. And the fact that it was Jewish, once it went viral, once it got on the internet, the Jewish Diaspora — if that’s the right phrase — just went nuts. I was taken off a Canadian tour because of it.

You were scratched from the bill?
Yes. I was taken off a Canadian tour and an American tour because the people my promoters worked with in both those countries, either were Jewish, or have Jewish money. Jewish money makes it sound like I think it’s a kind of Zionist conspiracy, but what I mean is that they had connections with Jewish corporations or something. I don’t mean it in any sort of inflammatory sense. They panicked. As part of the “healing process” I met the head of the Canadian Jewish congress in a Thai restaurant in Toronto.

That sounds like the start of a joke we once heard...
Anyway, he told me his point of view and I told him mine, and that was it. We both agreed to differ, but we left as friends.

How sweet...
The funny thing about it was that I got death threats here in Ireland.

Now we’re talking!
Yeah, the head of some secret division of the Irish police force — the Irish police who deal with international espionage and serious crimes, the Irish guys who hook up with Interpol and the CIA — they phoned me up and said, “We just want to tell you that we’ve received some information that there are two men on their way over via Germany to kill you.” And the funny thing was that when he said ,“They’re on their way over via Germany to kill you,” he left this big, long pause and then he says, “But we’re not taking it too seriously.” That was very Irish. “You’re about to die. But maybe not. We’re not too concerned to be honest.”

Are you sure the assassins were trying to exact retribution for your Jewish jokes and not your Down Syndrome material?
It’s funny, because there’s an echo of the Jewish thing in the thing with Down Syndrome. I was doing material about it. I have people in my family who have Down Syndrome. I was a mascot for the Special Olympics. That’s funny in itself, because in the Special Olympics, it’s usually someone with special needs who is led out by able-bodied people, but it was the other way around for me. I got talking to people afterwards, and I had this amazing conversation with this family who were talking about how the sex drive of people who have Down Syndrome can be very high. They can also often lack the codes of behaviour that we would have when we’re out in public.

Speak for yourself…
If they get horny, you can end up in embarrassing situations where they end up squeezing a woman’s bum, or something. 

Hang on, we do that...
So I was asking them, “How do you cope with that?” They said, “We have a prostitute who comes around to our house once a week for our son, who’s in his early 20s. But she only comes around if he behaves himself on the other days of the week.” I said, “Wow, that’s fascinating.” The comic take on that was that I was imagining what it was like to be the dad. The doorbell rings every Thursday evening, you open it and this lovely-looking prostitute comes in, and she goes upstairs and has sex with your son. And you’re sitting there, looking at your wife, and you haven’t had sex for three or four weeks. And you’re thinking, “Jesus, what’s a guy to do around here to get lucky…”

Maybe you just need less newspapers.
Well, hang on, because this is interesting. A national radio show in Ireland who would scour the country for any type of thing that might be perceived as scandalous got wind of this somehow. The furore that got created was much bigger than the story that I was telling. What they did was phone people who hadn’t been at the show, but were likely to be upset. So people came on who hadn’t seen the material, but they were upset. It’s on this radio show, and then the following couple of days it’s all over the tabloids. Four or five million people read about it, as opposed to the ten or 20,000 people who’d seen it live up until then, and knew the context of it. So what I did was I invited Down Syndrome Ireland to the show. They’re the main body who represent people who have Down Syndrome in Ireland. They came along to the show, and they issued a press statement afterwards saying, “We saw the show, we think it’s fine, we don’t have any problem with this material whatsoever.” But the radio show didn’t broadcast the press statement, and none of the newspapers who wrote the story published the press statement, because that’s not an interesting story.

On a lighter note — you’re often on David Letterman’s show. We heard he employs 25 full-time comic writers. So why aren’t his jokes funny?
You don’t think he’s funny?

Not really. He’s pretty hit ’n’ miss.
But Dave Letterman is so funny that the worse the joke, the funnier it is. He’s not like Jay Leno, where he’s having an aneurism trying to convince you how funny the material is. Dave makes a virtue of the fact that this is really shit. Like, “Let’s see how shit this is! Okay!”

Well, if he’s aiming to be shit, then he has definitely achieved his aim.
He’s great. The first time I did that show I was on with Tom Hanks and Britney Spears. It was phenomenal, because they closed off two or three streets in New York for autograph hunters. The police bend over backwards for famous stars in the States. I was the third guest on
the show, so they sent a limousine to our hotel, and there are thousands of people by the side of the street. The police are holding them back with barriers. Tom has gone in, but they’re still waiting for Britney. I pull up with my wife in the car and I’m so embarrassed. I’m going to walk out of this car and 10,000 people are going to go, “Who the f**k is that?” It was awful. The amazing thing was that my wife had gotten dressed up. She has beautiful red hair, and it was blow-dried, and she was looking absolutely stunning. The two of us got out of the car, and everybody looked at me, and looked at her, and they said, “She’s obviously the famous one,” and started asking for her autograph. And she signed them as well! Yvonne Tiernan. She was chuffed. It was a good night. 

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