Jon Kenny

If ever anyone was a living contradiction of the old adage that nice guys finish last in showbusiness, it’s Jon Kenny. Sitting down for a summit with hotpress in a plush conference room in the Westbury Hotel, the comedian immediately volunteers for tea-making duties, and enthusiastically elicits details of your correspondent’s recent journalistic assignments.
But then, one wouldn’t expect to encounter anything other than down-to-earth friendliness from a performer who’s earned his spurs in the dues-paying manner Kenny has. Bidding adieu to his Limerick secondary school aged 15, Kenny immediately began playing bass with a popular local covers outfit called Gimik, as well as becoming an active participant in community theatre.
Whilst he remains a keen musician to this day (frequently incorporating self-penned numbers into his live shows), it was the latter discipline to which the nascent Kenny felt compelled to devote the majority of his energies. After winning a number of All-Ireland amateur drama awards for his performances in such heavyweight plays as Saibh and Butterflies Of Freedom, Kenny eventually compressed his diverse artistic talents into a fully fledged cabaret revue show, winning himself a sizeable cult following in the process.
Linking up with fellow Limerick native Pat Shortt in the mid-’80s, the duo expanded upon Kenny’s tried and trusted format of music and character-based humour, and as D’unbelievables, would in time hone their performances to such an extent that they became quite possibly the most popular act in the history of Irish comedy.
However, Kenny’s career was dramatically put on hold in early 2000 when he was diagnosed with cancer. Forced into a three-year period of semi-retirement, the comedian has now thankfully made a full recovery, and philosophically views the experience as a wake-up call to conduct a thorough inventory of his life and work.
These days, Kenny is back in the limelight with a brand new solo show, widely acclaimed as his most accomplished work to date. In conversation, he is the essence of gentlemanly conviviality, with perhaps the slightest tinge of melancholy permeating his soft Limerick burr, an accent shot through with the kind of elegant elocution one only tends to encounter in those thesps who have spent decades treading the boards.
All in all, the writer, actor, comedian and musician proved to be as engaging an interviewee as he is a performer.

PN: So Jon, how does it feel to be back out in the big bad world of showbusiness without Mr. Shortt by your side?
JK: It’s great. I mean, I used to do stuff on my own years ago anyway, so it feels like a return to that in many ways. There’s great freedom in writing a solo show, because of course everything’s up to yourself. And I’m sure Pat has found this in doing his own material since we started working apart, but sometimes you find yourself taking a character into certain areas, and almost by default saying, “I can’t go there, that’s not quite right for our show.”
But of course, it’s no longer D’unbelievables, so you can explore different facets of these characters. I mean, some people might think that there are disadvantages to going back out on my own at this point, but that really hasn’t been the case. In fact, it’s been very liberating. It’s an exciting time, y’know?

PN: One of the new characters you’re performing is a leather-clad lounge singer called Pablo Maloney, who’s putatively a huge hit on the cabaret circuit in the Costa Del Sol. You mentioned in a recent interview that he’s based on someone you actually knew.
JK: That’s right, he was a guy who lived locally down in Limerick. I suppose I took some liberty with the character, because he was actually a composite of two different people. One guy was a lounge singer, and then there was another fellow I knew who actually went to France, but he wasn’t a singer at all – he was a chef. Anyway, he had gone away and spent a little time in Europe, not very long. But from the time he came back from Europe – which was many, many years ago – he had adopted a completely new persona. And he never let it drop for one minute for the rest of his life.
I mean, he constantly spoke in broken English. And people would meet him and say to me, “By the way, when did the French fella move over here?” And I’d say to them, “No, no, he’s from Hospital! He was raised here!” And people would be incredulous, saying, “He couldn’t be from County Limerick, he hardly speaks English!”

PN: But was there any sense of affectation, or was there something deeper going on there?
JK: Well obviously there was a humourous side to it, but at the same time this guy had made a very serious choice about how he wanted to live his life. He believed it, he became someone else, almost as if he went away on holiday and came back a different person. So it’s fascinating to think that people do these kinds of things. I suppose people develop schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders, but this was very real. Now, whether or not that man was just fed up with the old self, or more likely, he was trying to run away from something, it was a bit insane. But it does go on.

PN: Are you familiar with The League Of Gentlemen?
JK: Yeah, they’re great.

PN: I think their work is very similar to yours, in that they take provincial characters and make them slightly caricatured, yet there’s always an uncomfortable degree of truth in there.
JK: Well I’ll tell you, I’ve got this really interesting character lined up for the new show. He’s a barber, but his profession is kind of incidental; it’s more about what goes on inside his head. He knows everything about everyone, and he always hits on those things that are the skeletons in people’s closets. Or rather, he goes to the door of the closet and opens it slightly, but he doesn’t let the skeleton come tumbling out. What he does do is fucking hint that it’s in there, and that’s the most important point.
There’s something pretty sadistic about him, actually. He doesn’t really look at anyone when he’s talking to them, or at the audience when he’s doing one of his monologues. He kind of looks out into space. And then he gives the odd knowing aside about somebody, like, “(Adopts creepy nasal whine) Well, you know, there was a brother of his there now, and he was above in Dublin for a while. Living with the girlfriend, don’t you know. Course he moved back down here recently – the girlfriend nowhere in sight.” And then he’s on to the next thing.

PN: Are you tempted to explore the darker aspects of characters, generally speaking?
JK: You know, even if they maybe appear on the surface to be stupid or daft or funny, there’s something slightly odd going on with them. Certainly in the show I’m doing now, some of the characters are quite dark, insane nearly. But behind even the insanity, they have their own reality. I mean, maybe at first when people hear them talk, they’ll go, “Fuck it, he’s mad.” But then as they start to listen to what they’re on about, they might find themselves thinking, “There’s a truth to what he’s saying; I can see where the madness comes from.”
Like, there’s a character I’ve brought back into the show, I wanted to develop him more. I started doing him a few years back and I dropped him. I called him ‘Mad Bill of The Hill’, and he was based on this concept of the wind, funnily enough. He was a fella from the west of Ireland obsessed with wind and obsessed with nature. He has this whole relationship with the landscape and his surroundings. And what it’s really about probably is how we’re selling ourselves short, destroying the countryside and so forth. And I guess what this guy is asking is what price have we paid for all of this? We might have jobs and tourism, but what else is suffering? Like, is what we’re selling real or is it just a big fucking sham?

PN: It’s interesting you say that. I actually grew up in a small-town in Co. Kildare, and I always felt that there was this undercurrent of weirditude – even latent psychosis – to the place, like you’d see in The League Of Gentlemen or Twin Peaks or The Butcher Boy; corrupt local government, domestic violence, alcoholism, bored teenagers, bad drugs and worse sex. It was a long way from the Bord Failte picture of things.
JK: Absolutely. A lot of damage has been done to the culture. I mean, very little strategic thought seems to go into how these places are actually going to function in the long-term. If you look at something as simple as planning in the country, some very questionable decisions have been taken at an administrative level. I actually think planning in rural Ireland is fucking disgraceful. There’s no awareness or sensitivity to what’s really going on. But you know, as I was saying to someone recently, parochialism is a funny thing. I mean, I know people in Manhattan who are parochial because they’ve never gone below 35th Street.

PN: Well, the topography of any town has as much to do with the mentality of the inhabitants as it does with the physical boundaries.
JK: Now there’s a theory! (Laughs) There’s a lot of truth to that. I mean, where does this thing actually enter into our minds? Is it because someone speaks with a different accent that we can say, “Oh, he’s obviously from the country, therefore he’s parochial.” I just think that it exists everywhere. And it’s not really narrow-mindedness, it’s putting people into a context where their society or environment is quite small. But what’s interesting is that most of us do live in fuckin’ small environments and among small cliques of people. But I suppose, ironically enough, your opportunities to escape when you’re out in the country are more restricted, particularly when you’re younger.

PN: Were you surprised at the runaway success of D’unbelievables?
JK: Yes. Totally. I don’t know if there was a point where the level it had reached ever really hit home with us, because we just kept moving all the time. I remember once, when we were just about to go onstage at some huge venue down the country, someone said to me, “Do you realise how much money you’re going to make over the next two hours?” And I didn’t want to know. I just went home and put the money in the bank and that was the end of it.
I mean, one thing I’ve often wondered over the past couple of years was why I didn’t take a break earlier. It certainly wasn’t because I couldn’t afford it. I never took a real holiday, I just kept working, because, well, that was what I did! I mean, what else was I gonna do, y’know? I’d been doing it for most of my adult life, so it seemed to make sense to just keep going. Crazy, but that’s the way it was.

PN: Ironically enough, in light of your massive success, there was always a degree of fear associated with purchasing a D’unbelievables ticket, as people were never sure whether or not they were going to be among the members of the audience singled out for some comic banter!
JK: That’s right, buying a ticket for one of our shows was always a step out into the unknown! (Laughs)

PN: But was making a more interactive kind of show always part of your plans from the beginning?
JK: It was, yeah. You see, I’d been working at different levels in theatre companies for many years, and I always really enjoyed it, but it was always a struggle just to get people to go and see the shows. And then after seeing some European companies, I suddenly realised that we had inherited this fuckin’ awful British system of performance, where you have the fourth wall, everyone acts, and the audience sits down and has this kind of Pavlovian response to what’s happening on stage.
I mean, you had that in Europe too, but there was also this movement that was exploring a whole new format of theatre, where each show was more like a happening than a conventional performance. The idea was to do something that would engage the audience, in every sense of the word. And I used to see these shows and think, “Fucking hell, this works, and nobody’s doing it here.” It was an open playing field.
I mean, why was everyone so obsessed with this pretentious acting thing? There’s nothing worse than going to see a play where actors are acting, ‘cos after a while you’re just sitting there going, “for fuck’s sake, they’re acting”, and you’re not believing in it. So in D’unbelievables, we really just wanted to throw all that out and have the characters behaving as if they knew everyone in the crowd. I mean, the reality was that we were no different than the people sitting in the audience, so why construct artificial boundaries? We wanted to break down those barriers.

PN: How did you get into acting in the first place?
JK: I just kind of fell into it by default. I wanted to do a few plays and just kind of try my hand at it, so when I was getting fed up of the band I was playing with in Limerick, I got involved with a couple of guys who were doing theatre on a local level in the city in the early eighties. I really enjoyed it from the off. And another important factor was that I actually suffered from dyslexia, and of course that was really a massive obstacle in terms of education back in those days. Here was I thinking that I couldn’t read, and yet I had to learn scripts to get along and do what I wanted to do. So that was a wonderful experience, realising that I can get into this, that I can understand it and really make a go of it. It was a great self-confidence thing, y’know?

PN: What was the appeal of performing on stage?
JK: I just loved the idea of exploring different characters. I suppose – to get pretentious for a minute – I was really into the idea of exploring the nuances of each part, and by extension learning a bit more about myself each time out. But I didn’t realise at the time just how hard acting is as a business, because if you’re a musician, even if no one wants to book you for a club date you can still stand on the street and busk, whereas if you stand on the street and act people will just think you’re fucking mad.
So I always enjoyed the acting, but the longer I did it the more I recognised that it can be a pretty unforgiving world in terms of just making a living, so I always held onto the music. When I didn’t have a regular part in a show, I’d do two or three gigs a week and that would keep me going.

PN: Speaking of your days as a musician, did you ever encounter any particularly hostile audiences in the bar-rooms and dance halls of Limerick?
JK: Fuck me, there were times when we were in places we shouldn’t have been in at all! Jesus, it was like the scene in The Blues Brothers where they’re performing behind chicken wire in that country and western bar. I remember situations years ago where you’d sit down and look out at the audience and say, “What the fuck are we doing here? There’s 400 punks at the gig and here we are doing glam rock!” We were doing Slade covers and the boys wanted the Sex Pistols!
But it was actually a great time to be playing, because a lot of good things came out of the punk movement and you had some wonderful groups like the Pistols and The Clash. Mind you, we saw an awful lot of shite as well; boys went on with toilet roll wrapped around their neck and played extreme noise trash that went on for what seemed like a fortnight. The 100 Club it wasn’t.

PN: You played a small part in Alan Parker’s film adaptation of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, a book which attracted criticism from certain quarters in Limerick who felt that the author was totally OTT in his descriptions of Dostoyevskian squalor. As a contemporary of McCourt’s, did you feel he portrayed the city in an accurate way?
JK: I think he did. I’d say it wasn’t just Limerick, Dublin would probably have been twice as bad back then. I was fortunate enough to be removed from it since we were out in the countryside, but I’d say if you went into any urban area it would have been pretty horrific. I think those people who were offended were perhaps taking things just a little too personally. No place in those days was a bed of roses, in fact it was savage. It was incredibly tough if you had no money and you had to live in that squalor in the tenements. It really wasn’t a nice time for a lot of people, you know?

PN: You also played a part alongside Uma Thurman and Liam Neeson in Les Miserables. Is movie acting something you’d like to do more of?
JK: Yeah, I’d like to do it, but I could never get my head around it because of all the waiting around and… I never I had a big enough part! (Laughs uproariously) I mean, I’ve done some nice bits and pieces and I’ve enjoyed them, but it’s a very different kind of environment, it demands a lot of time and concentration if you’re going to do it properly. Maybe if I had enough time to really sit down and get into the part, I’d do it.

PN: Did you ever fear you’d never perform again when you were diagnosed with cancer three years ago?
JK: Well, I always believed that everything was going to be fine, I think the question was more whether I wanted to come back and do it again. I’d think, “Okay, if I am going to go back, how I am going to approach it? What work-rate am I going to do? Am I going to be in control of the work-rate or is it all just going to take off again like a mad rollercoaster?”

PN: Do you think over-work was a significant contributory factor to you developing the illness?
JK: I think it was. I think I was missing a lot of things and I was burning myself out. And the truth was that I didn’t really have another life outside of my career. I had a family of course, but being away six days a week definitely takes it toll. I’d been more or less touring since I was 16, so there was a lot of mileage on the clock. We just did too much.

PN: Did you go public with your illness to raise cancer awareness?
JK: No, I didn’t. Initially I just told my mum that I’d been diagnosed with cancer, and none of the rest my family knew and none of my aunts and uncles knew – and before I knew it, it was in the papers. So I had to go and ring my aunts and uncles and tell them, because they’re elderly people now, and you want them to find about it in a more dignified manner than reading it on page five of a tabloid. So there was a mad scramble to the phone to contact them and make sure they heard from me personally before they heard it from someone else.

PN: Do you feel that was press intrusiveness at its worst?
JK: Well, I just thought it was stupid. I thought there must be more important things going on in the country than the fact that I got sick. But then again, I now go to a certain amount of launches for cancer fundraising projects and so forth, and I suppose when you have a certain amount of profile and you go along and shake hands and congratulate people on their efforts – which are often pretty extraordinary – it does give them a lift. And people give me a lift as well, because they’ve come through it.
There’s a great sense of support for each other, which is important because there is still that awful stigma with regards to cancer. It’s like an epidemic in Ireland at this point, and although things are progressing all the time with medicine and treatments, there is still an awful lot that has to be learned about it. I mean, more people survive it than die of it, which is something that I think needs to be highlighted, because you need it to keep yourself going and to keep yourself thinking positively. Staying positive is a huge part of the treatment.

PN: You were diagnosed with the illness at the height of your success with D’unbelievables. Did you ever feel cheated in any way?
JK: No, I don’t think that I’ve been cheated at all, I think that I’ve been blessed. I mean that. I suppose I wouldn’t use the word “blessed” too often, but I think that there was a reason for me getting it. I think I needed to stop, to stand back and look at what was going on around me. And maybe I also had to look inwards and ask myself what the hell was going on internally. There are two parts to treatment and healing, and your own healing is equally important as the medicinal treatment.
And once you become aware of it, perhaps some people heal quicker than others. But with me, I know it’s probably going to be an ongoing process to try and sort out what’s going on in my life and in my head. Hopefully I can continue to work through the confusion, and lose some of the baggage that I was carrying around before I got ill, whether it was unhappiness or resentment or anger. I think it’s important to know where it’s coming from and to deal with it. So I didn’t feel cheated – I think I was lucky get the opportunity to sit back and reflect.

PN: So finally Jon, what does the short-term future hold for you?
JK: Well, I’m going to be touring the show up until Christmas, and we have another few gigs lined up for the new year. I wouldn’t mind going back and maybe doing another straight role in theatre – I was actually asked to do a play in the Gaiety earlier this year, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to take them up on the offer. It’s a bit selfish of me I suppose, most people would probably give their right hand to do it. But there are a few people around I’d like to work with, and a few different projects around I’d like to get involved with, so I’m keeping my options open.
That’s something I’ll think I’ll do a little more from now on, because the road work is going to be less intense and I’m gonna give myself a bit more time to do other things. But there are no concrete plans at the moment. I’ll tour the show until the new year, and after that, we’ll see. I suppose if I make enough money I might get to Kilkee for a few weeks!