'I'm a clown - and proud to be a clown'

He’s only 36, but Andrew Maxwell has been on the comedy circuit for 20 years. His routine has developed from beers and birds to history, politics and even religion

IT’S STRANGE TO THINK that Andrew Maxwell is a gnarled old comedy veteran with a stage career of 20 years behind him. Although he is 36, you would still ask to see his ID if you were serving him in a pub. The wide-eyed kid with the chip on his shoulder who would hustle for gigs at the Comedy Cellar in Dublin and riff on the fact that he was “the only Protestant in Kilbarrack” arrived on the scene just as laddish humour was in the ascendant. His salty tales of beers and birds made him an instant hit on the London club circuit before he went on to develop a formidable following at the Edinburgh festival.

There are still some vaguely laddish inflections from him on The Panel, the RTÉ show that made him a star in his homeland, but over the years he has developed into a reflective and analytical performer, thanks to some high-profile television work and a lot of globe-trotting gigs in such places as China and Africa.

These days his hour-long one-man shows are more informed by the spirit of Noam Chomsky, the American philosopher and political activist, and Lenny Bruce, the American comedian and satirist. “Which is handy, because I plan to finish my career as a comic on cruise lines,” he says.

"When I began I was of that time when it was all Britpop and Loadedmagazine," he says. "I did get caught up in that, because that's what was happening at the time; that was what audiences expected from you.

"I got a big job early on with a BBC TV programme called The Sunday Show. I was there as the lad or bloke component, so maybe, yes, I did play up to it at the time. But then again I was still in my 20s so the material was always going to reflect a twentysomething's concerns.

“But something changed in comedy at the end of the 1990s. Bush got into power and 9/11 happened. For me there was this paradigm shift in how I approached stand-up. I wanted to bring the seriousness to the fore. I think there were facets of my personality that I had kept hidden. It wasn’t that I suddenly had a political awakening or anything, but I started to examine the world around me more.”

He was also married with children, which always changes one’s perspective.

His new DVD, One Inch Punch– "the title is a Bruce Lee reference" – shows a very different comedian from the one who is happy to quip his way through The Panel.

The press release describes him as “an intrepid social commentator and a political protagonist on a mission to liberate minds with the power of comedy”.

Maxwell’s explanation is: “Okay, it’s a press release, and it is going to be a bit flowery like that, but, over the last few years in particular, I have been feeding my curiosity about the state of the world and the make-up of political and religious hierarchies.

“I know I’m not the most erudite comic going, but I do soak all this stuff up and it does percolate through into the set. One of the things really attracting my attention now is ancient Greek history. And there was something just the other day that really got me excited: I found out that Elgar, the composer, had faked his own death. Basically, he was so vain that he wanted prior copy approval of his official death photo. I find stories like that endlessly fascinating.

“Some you can get material out of; some you can’t. But, as I said, it’s all about feeding my curiosity of history, politics and religion.”

A line in his last show about the 7/7 bombings in London sums up his new approach. Talking about Islamic fundamentalism, he made the point that the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks “had absolutely nothing to do with Muslims. They had everything to do with a psychopathic billionaire who’s waging a despotic global war against working-class people”.

At the same time, he remains suspicious of stand-ups doing political comedy. “For me that sort of material is more a comment on the world we live in and how the media treat it in terms of coverage. I am not and never will be a political comedian. I’m a clown and proud to be a clown. Political analysis coming from a clown? I don’t think so.”

The new DVD, which is taken from a Vicar Street show earlier this year, also includes a mini-film from 2004 that he had almost forgotten about.

"It's a short called Night of the Heckle.An Austrian friend of mine filmed it over one night gigging in London. I had four different shows on that night, so it just follows me around to give some idea of what the life of a jobbing club comic is like.

“When I watched it back I was really struck by how youthful I look and how odd it was to see people smoking in comedy clubs. It’s supposed to be about how a comic deals with the heckle but is really more of ‘this is what it is really like, this so-called glamorous job feature.”

Unlike now, when Irish comedians can make a living of sorts here, there was nothing for a bright young stand-up in the early 1990s. He says that cutting his teeth on the unforgiving London circuit was the making of him.

"It's so weird for me now, because before The Panelcame along I had built up my whole career in the UK and got to the stage where I could sell out my month-long Edinburgh runs," he says.

“But just because of one TV programme I suddenly became much better known in Ireland. And that really is a fantastic privilege for me. The sheer kick I get from being able to tour around Ireland is amazing – and it allows me to film these 10-minute travelogues wherever I go in the country that go up on the Discover Ireland and the Guardian newspaper websites.”

He sees TV exposure as a way to open doors for him. "When I was offered to go on the recent run of RTE's Celebrity BainisteoirI jumped at it on the condition that I got to work with the GAA team in the town in Fermanagh where my mother is from," he says. "I always wanted to trace that side of the family, and being up there, working with them and becoming friends with a lot of them was just a win-win situation for me.

"I don't worry about whether it is good or bad for my career. If something piques my interest I will do it. The last show, Conflict Revolution,saw me perform on the Shankill Road in Belfast to a loyalist audience, followed later that night with a show on the Falls Road to a republican audience. How could any Irish comic, particularly a Protestant from a predominantly Catholic area like me, turn that chance down?"

Farther afield he’s also the prime mover and artistic director behind Altitude, a comedy festival held at a ski resort in the French Alps every March. “There is this dry ski slope in Edinburgh where, during the festival, I always take the other comics out with me to do some snowboarding,” he says.

“I just thought, let’s do this in real snow and attach a festival to it, and that’s how Altitude came about. We began it just as the recession was kicking in, but it’s holding up fine and offers something very different for the average ski-holiday person.”

It was while skiing at Altitude that he developed a new stage approach.

Exhausted after a day on the slopes, he had to sit on a stool for that night’s show. “Because the legs were hanging off me I had to do the gig sitting down – and, weirdly, that changed everything.

“Because I was sitting down the presentation and the material became very different. I found that, without being able to roam around the stage like I usually do, I had to work harder on the bare material. Everything had to be reframed into storytelling mode.

“It sounds silly, but it made me a better comic. I felt like Dave Allen. It was sit-down comedy, and it changed everything – for the better.”

One Inch Punchwas released yesterday. Andrew Maxwell is at Vicar Street, in Dublin, on February 19th