DUBLIN’s Jason Byrne is a comedian who has earned plaudits for his stand-up, television and radio work. Recognisable for his stints on comedy programme Live At The Apollo, Byrne won a Sony Radio Gold Award in 2011 for his Radio 2 show. The 44 year-old is known for making use of audience interaction and his new set, Jason Byrne Is Propped Up, revolves around a range of bizarre props.

Byrne tells EDWIN GILSON about improvisation, the pitfalls of television and keeping himself interested.

Hi Jason, how are you?

I’m good thanks. Are you 24?

Twenty three. How did you get so close?

It’s all about how fast you say hello. Younger people do things much faster, in shorter time. My dad will answer the phone like, “helllllooooo”. I think it is because our life is so fast that we’ve got to get things done quickly.

You’re talking at quite a leisurely pace now.

I think it’s because I’m looking out at my garden. It’s pretty serene.

Are you looking forward to starting your UK tour? It’s a pretty intense schedule.

I am but to be honest comedians are always on tour. It doesn’t really stop. I’m hoping that I’ll collect lots of different props from around Britain in secondhand and bric-a-brac shops on this tour. I just collect a lot of junk, you know.

Yes, props. This show features a lot of them. Is there a cohesive narrative behind the action?

There’s a big duck on my poster and that is quite an important part of a set piece in the middle. There’s a duck and then a stuffed owl and guys wearing a dolphin head and a shark head. Those props all have narratives behind them. Then I have a Coldplay theme running through, with a couple of Chris Martin heads. I just keep adding stuff in. I was in Cork and found a chest expander. I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do with it. It’s really weird, because I do the stand-up and the props but you can see people’s faces light up when you just make stuff up.

It’s risky though isn’t it, relying on improvisation?

Yeah, but people have enough confidence in me and I have enough confidence in my comedy brain. It’s only part of it – I wouldn’t go into a two-hour show with nothing and say, “right, let’s see what happens here”. People paying in would be pretty annoyed I think. Seventy per cent of the show is prepared but the content of that 70 per cent can change. I was just doing gigs in India and there was this one guy in Delhi who I kept using onstage because he was so much fun. People thought he must be a plant but he was just a very funny guy.

Do you ever get people reluctant to engage in audience interaction? I suppose if they knew about your show they wouldn’t buy a ticket for the front seat.

Some people end up at the front when they don’t know me and then they see me start to talk to people and you can see their faces start to get that “oh no” look. That is no problem and I would never pick somebody who didn’t want to do that. You don’t want to pick people who do want to get up either, though. I got a guy up who was waving at me, during a nativity play in Australia. He got more and more odd as he was up there. He started pretending to be Mel Gibson in the play and shouting “I hate Jews” across the stage. He thought it was funny. I tried to change his part in the play to a donkey or something to quieten him. That kind of thing doesn’t happen very much.

When you say you’re going back to prop comedy do you mean you have roots in this form?

I used to do that when I started out – I always had props because I had a terrible memory and couldn’t remember the content of my show. A lot of people who have to remember 1,000 numbers or something do it the same way, by using objects to trigger their memory. I missed doing props when I stopped and this year I decided to do loads of them. I did Edinburgh to about 18,000 people this summer and they liked it. Well I don’t think they all liked it. The high 90s liked it. It gives me freedom to be a bit more silly and not too dark. Sometimes my stand-up can get me angry. But if you pick up a giant tomcat prop it’s hard to stay angry.

Did you feel like your more orthodox stand-up show had come to a natural end, hence the new approach?

It wasn’t even that, it was just boredom in my own brain. I have to keep my own brain interested. I’m not similar to any comic. I’m very different. The stories and the props both work so why not put it all in the arsenal? Maybe I should call it World War Three. All my weapons at once. Next year I might do something completely different again. It’s just about keeping myself interested – different angles, different stories.

You’ve had success on radio and television – what keeps you doing stand-up?

You talk to television people and they can wreck your head. They say the same thing time and time again. I don’t like putting my whole show on the screen. If I put my whole show on the screen, there’s be some executive saying “can there be a prize at the end?”. I’ll do Live At The Apollo but I wouldn’t do a whole show for television. The radio and television is all fine but stand-up is what I love the most. If I had to give up everything and keep one thing, I’d keep the live stand-up. Nobody tells you what to do.

When one of your jokes is told on Live At The Apollo, say, is it a problem that it might get repeated so often on television re-runs that you can no longer use it?

The only problem in that regard is that I don’t tend to use stuff again. I get people saying “I thought you were going to do a routine about this or that” and I’m thinking “that’s seven years old”. We wish we were like a band in that we could play the same songs over and over. Years back that’s how it was in comedy, people used to tell the same gags. But people like Jimmy Carr and all the lads are always re-writing, we all have more or less the same audience coming back. Let’s say I did tell an old joke that had been on TV – people wouldn’t laugh as much because they’re already anticipating it.

I think that’s everything, thanks for talking to us.

That’s why I love talking to 23-year-olds. They don’t hang around.

Jason Byrne, The Old Market, Upper Market Street, Hove, Friday, November 4, 8pm, £17.50, 01273 201801