JAKE O’KANE: ‘Stoicism of Ulster psyche helped us weather lockdown’

The popular NI comic and former star of The Blame Game tells JOANNE SAVAGE about why as an introvert he rather enjoyed social distancing and how he felt the pandemic was tantamount to an apocalypse wherein he thought about building a moat around his house to keep the viral threat at bay
Comedian Jake O'Kane, 59, takes a wry look at our response to the Covid pandemic in his new standup show Maskerade which will arrive at venues across the provinceComedian Jake O'Kane, 59, takes a wry look at our response to the Covid pandemic in his new standup show Maskerade which will arrive at venues across the province
Comedian Jake O'Kane, 59, takes a wry look at our response to the Covid pandemic in his new standup show Maskerade which will arrive at venues across the province

Jake O’Kane’s new show Maskerade is currently touring the province, with topics ranging from asking who exactly put Jamie Bryson on that bin (he’s Twitter mates with Jamie and swears he has an excellent sense of humour) to the eccentricities of our Covid response - “You wouldn’t think wearing masks would be a challenge for certain people here in Northern Ireland would you?” he ponders, as well as promising an added dose of self-parody on the challenges of getting older.

O’Kane has made a name for himself as an arch provocateur, but also as someone fully acculturated to the peculiarities, quirks and kinks of the Northern Irish psyche and the different social practices that make us who we are in a province where he finds a rich mine of material to turn into comedy gold (“Jamie and anyone thinking about climbing atop a wheelie bin in future needs to be careful because I have it on good authority from medics that getting on top of one of those is a serious public health risk, even if you are doing it just to squash the rubbish in rather than address a crowd”).

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The teetotaller, who runs an off-licence on the side (nice arithmetic there) may be “closer to 60 than 27”, but he feels about 27 in his heart and swerved into comedy after a youth spent being as he diplomatically puts it “rehoused” in North Belfast and being sharp-tongued and quick-witted with his teachers.

Jake and his dog Toffee heading for a walk in the rain. The comic is optimistic as the pandemic reaches its endgame and feels the speed at which scientists developed a vaccine for the virus was nothing short of 'miraculous'Jake and his dog Toffee heading for a walk in the rain. The comic is optimistic as the pandemic reaches its endgame and feels the speed at which scientists developed a vaccine for the virus was nothing short of 'miraculous'
Jake and his dog Toffee heading for a walk in the rain. The comic is optimistic as the pandemic reaches its endgame and feels the speed at which scientists developed a vaccine for the virus was nothing short of 'miraculous'

Basically, he has always had a bit of a mouth on him, and has used it to maximum effect - compering the Empire Laughs Back Comedy Club in Belfast for years, a comedy hotspot where Patrick Kielty first honed his craft and also turning up as a regular on BBC NI’s The Blame Game alongside Tim McGarry and Colin Murphy, but his solo material almost always sells out in venues across Ulster, mostly because he is so adept at being an equal opportunities offender, as in, he mercilessly satirises both sides of our historic divide with equal amounts of savage glee.

Even while he is able to strut on stage to do standup with nerves of steel, what he calls the “martial art of the performing arts, because it’s just you up there with a microphone, no set, nowhere to hide and you have to be like lightning in keeping hecklers in place”, he maintains that off-stage he is actually a rather reticent character, and while others may have been lamenting the pains of social distancing, he, in fact, “rather enjoyed it.”

Father-of-two Jake said: “I have no idea why, and it would take the best kind of therapist or psychologist there is to explain this weird paradox in my personality, but If I walk into a room and there’s five people and I don’t know anybody, I will go into a corner, almost as if I am completely socially dysfunctional or some kind of monosyllabic hermit out of their enclave. Then, on the other hand, for some reason I have never felt uncomfortable walking out on stage, be it in front of 500 or 4,000 people. I feel at ease and at home up there and it’s like a different part of me taking over, although it’s not as if I’m assuming a different character, it is very much authentically still me. I just can’t explain that contradiction in me.”

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He’s been doing standup for over 20 years now, in all kinds of places, some more down at heel and some more swish, but although the years have made him a pro at embarrassing hecklers into shamed silence, he maintains that comics never lose their fear of completing falling apart on stage, and that in fact it is an intrinsic part of perfecting the ‘martial’ art of successful standup.

Jake larking about at home where he has been incarcerated, like many of us, working from home on comedy sketches for YouTube and what he calls 'anti-social' mediaJake larking about at home where he has been incarcerated, like many of us, working from home on comedy sketches for YouTube and what he calls 'anti-social' media
Jake larking about at home where he has been incarcerated, like many of us, working from home on comedy sketches for YouTube and what he calls 'anti-social' media

“Sometimes you can walk into a gig, and for whatever reason, the chemistry in the room or whatever, it’s just not going to work, no matter what you do. I have read, even, about gigs that fell apart for Billy Connolly. A while back a mate of mine named Michael Smiley was compering a gig at a theatre in London and he had seen me doing a lot of political satire and stuff and asked me to go over there and do a show. So I went over and I can’t even remember what joke I began with but I couldn’t even see the audience and they couldn’t see me. It turns out it was a really lefty, sort of right-on crowd, and  I can’t remember what I began with, but I completely died on stage. 

“At one point somebody threw a plastic glass. It was a total disaster and I walked off to the defeated sound of my own feet on the floorboards in silence. That was one of the those gigs where I still wake up at 3am in the morning in a cold sweat thinking about it.

“But it was my fault! You have to gauge an audience and feel the vibe in the room and connect with the people in front of you.”

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His new show is focused on our response to the Covid pandemic, which has managed to change the world and all of our lives, forever: “At the start of it all I felt like it was actually the apocalypse,” he confesses. “I took to the house, but I was actually thinking of digging a moat around it too. Being a reader, I had read a lot over the years about how bad pandemics can be. I knew all about the Spanish flu, I knew all about the Ebola outbreaks, I knew about the dangers of a flu pandemic, so none of that reading made me feel remotely calm or rational about what was happening. 

Jake is cute as a button visiting Santa aged approx three alongside his three younger brothers Connor, Barry and Damien. Today he might be 'pushing 60 but feels about 27' at heart. Perhaps a life in comedy prevents one's soul from growing old?Jake is cute as a button visiting Santa aged approx three alongside his three younger brothers Connor, Barry and Damien. Today he might be 'pushing 60 but feels about 27' at heart. Perhaps a life in comedy prevents one's soul from growing old?
Jake is cute as a button visiting Santa aged approx three alongside his three younger brothers Connor, Barry and Damien. Today he might be 'pushing 60 but feels about 27' at heart. Perhaps a life in comedy prevents one's soul from growing old?

“But I think because of what we have been through here over the past 40 years there is a stoicism to the NI psyche, and an attitude where we just go, ‘Right, whatever, let’s get on with it’. Not much shocks us and so we’ve persevered.”

‘WHY I ACTUALLY CALL IT ‘ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA’

Jake is positive that we are finally reaching the endgame of the pandemic. “I can see an end in sight to the Covid nightmare and it’s all down to the hard work and genius of scientists who developed this vaccine. That they came up with a vaccine so quickly was to me miraculous. But I think a lot of the advances we have made medically are amazing. I can’t wait for the moment when we look back and go ‘Yeah, that was horrendous, but now we know how to respond to something like this.’

“People say ‘Oh, maybe a better world will emerge from this, but I think that’s being a bit idealistic, I mean I think we will always revert to type.

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“People say we really came together via social media and so on, but I actually call it anti-social media. Online we just peddle disinformation and people’s susceptibility to being conned is frightening to me, I mean people can be swayed into sharing very strange views. The level of mind control that people live under is frightening and there’s this confirmation bias where they find false evidence for their views and just keep going on in a loop.”

‘I WAS BORN IN BELFAST IN 1961, SO MY BIGGEST CHALLENGE HAS BEEN STAYING ALIVE’

“I was always quick, even at school, I had the quick answer back for the teacher,” reflects Jake O’Kane on his childhood.

His family moved around a fair bit during his youth because of the Troubles and north Belfast being a rather precarious area at the time.

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“I started off going to two primary schools in north Belfast, local difficulties there as I would describe it, meant that I had to move about an awful lot. One school was up in Moneymeena and I went from there to a boarding school in the Republic.

“I was incarcerated there in St Michael’s for five years until I escaped. It had been full of priests, but over time they ran out of them. I was always running south, meaning to head for Dundalk, but always ended up towards Newry. I was good at sports and English and that was it. But because I had so much movement in my early education stage, you know, I missed out on a lot of maths, physics and chemistry and couldn’t get my head around it. I was a painfully shy child.”

But as he got older he found himself becoming increasingly sharp-tongued, swift to fire back wittily at those around him and engaging in his secondary school class debates with vigour.

“When we did politics they used to set me up to get the argument started with the teacher, to get a bit of craic going. I seem to have a quick brain that way for getting things started or turning things around or seeing it from a different angle.”

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I ask him what the biggest challenge he has faced in his life so far is?

Without missing a beat he responds: “Well, staying alive. Not dying! And it’s getting harder the older I get. I was born in 1961, the worst time in this country’s history to be born, really. It might have been easier in Darfur or somewhere, I reckon.

“So most of my life was about trying to stay alive and that is the ongoing challenge. Isn’t that the case for us all?”

It might surprise people to know that as a comedian and therefore a comedy writer, Jake is a voracious reader and is always bemused when doing Zoom calls and people are impressed by the manifold titles on his bookshelf behind him: “You can’t write unless you read - the two go hand in hand. If you ask me what my favourite book is it’s like asking who your favourite child is. It depends where you are in life. Different books affect you at different times.

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“I’ve a lot of books and I do read a fair bit. I’m not so big into fiction, more history, biographies and politics, and all that stuff. But novels have just never appealed to me.”

Q&A: ‘I ACTUALLY ENJOY HOOVERING THE CORNERS OF CEILINGS AND UNDER CARPETS’

Tell us your earliest childhood memories?

I find it hard to remember what happened last week, never mind when I was a child. I remember being at my granny’s. One morning I got up, we lived in the middle of the Sperrins and my aunt was making bread down stairs.

You could smell that coming up the stairs and there was laughter and chat and that was a nice memory.

Who makes you laugh the most?

Billy Connolly.

Who is your best friend?

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My wife. I’m actually not a very social being, I’m quite an introvert. Covid - everyone has been crying about social distancing, but I find it quite nice.

Ideal way to spend a day off?

I’d spend it with my family and we’d go for a walk somewhere although I can’t get my kids out. They are 14 and 12 and they have no interest. My son is always wired into a computer game. With my daughter if she gives me the wrong look and doesn’t want to do something she actually frightens me.

I’m coeliac and so I’d like to also maybe order a Pizza Express who are very good at catering for that sort of thing. I eat from there so much I should really be buying shares from the place.

Describe yourself in three words?

Grumpy, short-tempered, kind.

Proudest achievement?

My children. But they are completely mortified by me.

What kind of music do you like to listen to in your downtime?

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I have no taste in music which my wife has lamented about since we first met. But I was a child of the 1960s so I loved The Beatles.

If you could have an ideal dinner party at which you could invite anyone from history, who would you bring?

Alexander the Great, he was some pup, Oscar Wilde and Gandhi, just so we could have a vegetarian option.

I can’t cook, being from North Belfast if I ever went near the kitchen my mummy would have beat the head off me and now my wife does all the cooking.

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But I do the cleaning which works out well because I have OCD and it really bothers me when she doesn’t hoover right up into the corner of the ceiling or under carpets, which I find very distressing. We have a clear demarcation of duties which works very well. I love my hoover, you have no idea. If you said to me, you have to get rid of either your car or your hoover then that’s it, the car is gone.

See Jake O’Kane’s Maskerade show on Feb 11 at the McNeill Theatre, Larne; Feb 12 at the Burnavon, Cookstown; Feb 17-19, Grand Opera House, Belfast; Feb 25, Canal Court Hotel, Newry; March 5, Strule Arts Centre, Omagh; March 20, Ardhowen Theatre, Enniskillen; and TBC - at The Braid, Ballymena.

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