Here's Johnny!

He's got the same initials as the Son of God. He's just come back from some great big adventures in Australia. And today, he's very, very hungover. Please be upstanding and politely refined with your welcome for the Irish delegate, Mr Johnny Candon.

We met Johnny Candon at lunchtime the day after a particularly heavy night before. Walking in to the pub, pint already firmly in hand, and having woken up less than thirty minutes before, the interview we had planned proceeded to crash and burn, being replaced instead with the exchange of scurrilous rumours about various members of the comedy community. "That's the best way to interview someone, isn't it?," he grinned halfway through. "Make sure they go out the night before, so that their brain is just scrambled, so you ask them questions and they just go 'Yes, I am gay.'"

What follows are the remains of the interview that we managed to rescue.

"I had never seen an Irish comedian before, apart from Jimmy Cricket and Frank Carson, so I always thought it was just people in tuxedoes doing things like that."

At one point in the mid 1990s, it seemed that almost every comedian that stepped on stage was Irish. You had your Tiernans, your Hughes, your Byrnes, your Morans and even more Byrnes. Year after year, Irish comedians were short-listed for the Perrier award, and quite often went on to win. They starred in sitcoms, they wrote novels, they sat on panel games, they produced some of the best comedy writing and performances of the past decade, and everyone agreed that it must be something in the water. These days, the onslaught of Irish comedy on the stand up circuit seems to have dissipated a little. Thanks to the growing comedy circuits of Dublin and Galway, many young fellows that feel the need to stand up in front of strangers and tell a string of jokes are able to do it from the comfort of their own country, and needn't make the trip across the water to entertain those on the main land. However, there is still quite a healthy presence of Irish up-and-comers working in the UK today. We thought, as part of the Comedy Lounge Four Nations Series, that we'd ask to Johnny Candon represent his country.

Johnny has been performing comedy for "four years and a month". His first experience of live stand up came when he first moved to London, and wandered down to the Meccano club. "I saw Dylan Moran," he remembers. "And I think Ed Byrne on the same bill. And possibly Graham Norton. It might have been an Irish night. And I just basically thought, wow, Irish people as comedians. I had never seen an Irish comedian before, apart from Jimmy Cricket and Frank Carson, so I always thought it was just people in tuxedoes doing things like that." Inspired by that night, and encouraged by his then girlfriend, he enrolled in a comedy course that was also attended by Simon Evans. "We used to go for coffee afterwards and then go drinking and talk about it. And we'd all sit there like we were all French beat poets in the 1950s, talking about the nature of comedy."

In the end he didn't complete the course, but bumped in to Simon Evans about two years later. "He said he was doing it, and I said 'but what do you do for a living?' And he said, 'This.' So I was like, Oh my God." He decided to give stand up another try, and hasn't looked back since.

"I got grabbed by about six old ladies after various shows, just going 'You're really horrible, you said dick'. Yeah. I also said 'fuck' and 'cunt', but they probably didn't know what that meant."

Johnny has just returned from a two month trip to Australia, where he performed alongside Hattie Hayridge and Junior Simpson in the Adelaide and Melbourne comedy festivals. "It was really nice. I got really depressed when I got back." The three comedians performed together under the title 'Best of the Fest', something of a lose label, considering none of the three appeared at the 2001 Festival, but Johnny explains that the qualification for the title is about as loose as qualifying for the Irish football team. "The Best of the Fest thing is, if you've ever set foot in Edinburgh, or even just gone through it on a train, you can be in the Best of the Fest. I mean, we were in the Cream of Irish last year, and there's much better Irish people than us."

Although the show was a sell out most nights, Johnny admits that he found the atmosphere in Adelaide a little hard going. "I hated Adelaide with a passion. It's basically one street. There's loads and loads of churches, people are really Christian there, and they get very offended very easily. But it's also the murder capital of Australia. So they're really religious, but they kill each other. That's basically where most hitch hikers to missing. I got grabbed by about six old ladies after various shows, just going 'You're really horrible, you said dick'. Yeah. I also said 'fuck' and 'cunt', but they probably didn't know what that meant."

During the Adelaide Festival, they were asked not to swear at the request of the woman who managed the theatre where they were performing, which Johnny found amusing and frustrating in equal parts. "I don't swear very much on stage. I mean, I haven't got swear words written in to my set, they just come out sometimes. But it's weird, you're five seconds ahead of the audience in your brain, and if you can feel a swear word coming on, you change it. It's like have Tourettes or a stutter." In the end, he came up with a novel solution, on the night the theatre manager came to see the show. "I changed all my swear words to really stupid words. Like antelope."

His proudest achievement of the Adelaide Festival resulted from the boredom felt by many of the performers, but fell outside the comedy gigs, when on a night off he and a friend went to an oyster bar. "I ate 44 of them in one go. I know, it's disgusting. We were just sitting there going, 'What will we do now?' 'I don't know.' And this woman would come over and say 'Do you want more?' and we'd go '…yeah.' But I got my name on the wall. It's a wall of twats. There's a photograph of you looking really sick."

"I'm not famous in any way, shape or form, so basically I need to do something more. I could go in to a playground with a gun, and then people would know me but…"

Having appeared at both the Australian comedy festivals this year, Johnny isn't going to be bringing a show to the Edinburgh Fringe. "I don't think I'm ready, really. I don't think I'm good enough to do it now. It's all well and good to do the 'Blah, blah blah, I'm Irish…' and stuff like that, but I think it would be pretty boring to watch an hour of me doing that. And also, I think if you put my face on a poster that just said 'Johnny Candon is on here', people wouldn't give a fuck. Because I'm not famous in any way, shape or form, so basically I need to do something more. I could go in to a playground with a gun, and then people would know me but…"

Nevertheless, he still plans to come up to the Festival at some stage during August, and hinted that he might even perform at one of the stand-up evenings. It is quite uncommon for comedians to come up to Edinburgh during the Festival purely for a visit, considering the pressures that performers can put each other under during August, but Johnny says that that kind of pettiness doesn't concern him. "I couldn't give a shit, if I wanted to be part of it, I would have done something about it. There's no point not doing anything about putting a show together and then being bitter when you see everybody else doing it." He plans instead to bring his first solo show up next year, but feels it is something that really needs to be worked on in order to sustain the audience. "Standing on stage for an hour in front of an audience tends to be quite exhausting because you can have peaks and troughs - you can't have a constant roll of laughter. It has to have more involving things than just jokes."

"When you're in London or wherever, and everything is going fine, this is all lovely. The first thing that goes wrong, or if it's just raining and you've no money, you're going 'If I was in Ireland, where I'd be a millionaire and the sun is always shining'."

Without moving to London, Johnny does not think that he would ever have even considered becoming a comedian in Ireland. "When I left Dublin there wasn't really that much going on comedy wise. You'd have people coming through, doing to Olympia theatre, but there's more now than there was. When I came over here all of a sudden there's a comedy club every five feet." The comedy circuit in Ireland is currently growing at something of an alarming rate, with The Laughter Lounge encouraging more and more of the general public to attend comedy gigs - and thereby becoming the Jongleurs of the Irish comedy scene. That said, there still isn't a big enough circuit to enable a move home just yet, and Johnny does confess to a certain degree of homesickness. "I think it's the grass is always greener. When you're in London or wherever, and everything is going fine, this is all lovely. The first thing that goes wrong, or if it's just raining and you've no money, you're going 'I was I was in Ireland, where I'd be a millonaire and the sun is always shining'."

He still gigs in Ireland as often as he's home, and has appeared at The Laughter Lounge in Dublin and The Empire in Belfast, which has the reputation of being quite a challenging gig. "It's a studenty crowd there, but also a local crowd, who hate middle class English people. It's a whole 'we hate the British' thing. So if I go on, I'm fine. I crank up my Dublin accent to about 11. They don't mind Adam Bloom, because he comes across as sort of special. You don't know whether to run away from him, or sit him on your lap and stroke his head until he falls asleep. There's not a gig like it in England, where you go on and they just hate you."

From this point in the interview onwards, things began to get a bit silly. The drink flowed as freely as the conversation, and if we were to reproduce some of what was said, the website would stand a very good chance of being shut down. So, in the interests of keeping up our sporadic services and following consultation with the Comedy Lounge law team, we're going to leave it at that.