PROFILE ANDREW MAXWELL:IT'S A RAINY NIGHT in Soho. Andrew Maxwell is standing on stage dressed in a cape and howling at the moon. Paul Merton and Jimmy Carr are waiting in the wings to go on. In the audience is a block booking of British paratroopers just back from Afghanistan, Stephen Fry, all of the Arctic Monkeys, a sizeable goth contingent and a drunken posse from west Belfast. It's 2am and things are getting rowdy.
Maxwell is doing material about what it was like for to grow up as the only Protestant kid in the Catholic area of Kilbarrack in Dublin. Something hits a nerve with the well-lubricated Belfast crowd. One of them, shaven of head and tattooed all over, stands up and shouts at him: “If ever you come to Andersonstown, I’ll have you shot.” He is utterly serious.
A weird hush descends on the room. Without missing a beat, Maxwell replies, “We’re not in Andersonstown now: we’re in the West End of London, and if I wanted to I could get you strangled and raped by a local Soho tramp for less than a fiver.”
The room erupts in laughter; the tension disappears. The eccentric, star-filled Fullmooners show (the audience is encouraged to drink cheap champagne and howl at the moon instead of laughing), which Maxwell organises every few months, is back on an even keel.
It’s that sort of extemporised quick wit that this week earned Maxwell a nomination, for the second time, for the Fosters Edinburgh Comedy Award. Formerly known as the Perrier, it’s the biggest prize in Irish and UK comedy. He’s the favourite to win the prize, which is announced at midnight tonight, and he is, by some margin, the people’s choice.
As popular with audiences as he is with his fellow comics, Maxwell is cheeky, irreverent, puerile and rude, but he is equally at home discussing ancient Greek philosophers, Dostoyevsky and Noam Chomsky in his set. Going to one of his performances makes you feel as if you’ve been intellectually mugged by a hoodie.
Standing in the queue for his show at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it’s a shock to discover from his flyers that the 37-year-old has been appearing here since 1995: the joke with Maxwell is that his 10-year-old son looks older than he does. Unlike the other big hitters at Edinburgh, he’s not going home early every night and getting in some Pilates classes during the day. One night he put on an impromptu midnight Fullmooners show, and as a headliner he got the magician Paul Daniels to do some of the filthiest material ever heard in the history of the fringe.
He also participated in a televised live poker/comedy show, was the MC at a strange show featuring professional wrestlers and stand-up comics in a ring, and organised a press launch for his now annual Altitude Festival, which takes place every March in the French Alps and involves skiing by day and stand-up by night. In his Daily Telegraph festival diary, he writes that the launch “got so messy you could see it on the Sky News helicopter”.
His show this year is a revelation, despite the fact he had to rewrite it on the run to include references to the riots in England and the phone-hacking scandal. "An informed and thoughtful response to current affairs with a popular touch that saves his fiercely intelligent comedy from seeming over-intellectual," is the Guardian's verdict. He even throws in some local material, criticising the Scottish National Party for releasing the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, saying, "The politicians here said he was released early because he had a life expectancy of six months. Yes, in Scotland. Start giving him fruit and veg and he'll live for years."
Sitting on a stool, enthralling his rapt audience with intelligent humour, he puts you in mind of a younger, working-class Dave Allen. Ironically, it was only when he stopped standing up and began sitting down that Maxwell came of age as a comic. At his Altitude festival a few years ago, he was so exhausted from snowboarding all day that he sat down for his whole gig that night.
“When you sit down on a stage, the presentation of the material totally changes,” he has said. “Because I wasn’t moving around the stage I had to work harder on the material and reframe everything in a storytelling mode.” He’s been sitting down ever since.
He began his comedy career – as did two other Irish winners of Edinburgh’s top award, Dylan Moran and David O’Doherty – sitting in the Comedy Cellar at the International Bar in Dublin, staring up in awe at Mr Trellis (Barry Murphy, Ardal O’Hanlon and Kevin Gildea) and wanting a piece of the action.
“They were the biggest act in Dublin at the time, in the early 1990s, and to them I was this 17-year-old hoodie from Kilbarrack, hassling them for gigs,” he says.
He moved to London at the age of 19, sleeping on the couch of his fellow comic Ed Byrne and throwing himself on to the London comedy circuit. His earliest break came when he got a job hosting BBC Radio 2's Sunday Show. He was the comedy programme's resident lad, and in the era of Britpop and Loadedmagazine, he burnished his laddish credentials with common-denominator humour.
Although Maxwell is possessed of a fine intellect, the late-night audiences at London’s Comedy Store didn’t want to hear his political and philosophical material, so he dished out routines about drinking beer and shagging birds. But the aftermath of 9/11 and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan couldn’t be ignored, and he gradually rounded some of his rougher edges for a more mature and reflective approach.
Maxwell has been holding his own at the top of the UK comedy circuit for many a year, but Irish audiences were unaware of his talents until he became a regular on RTÉ2's The Panel. One incident on the show led to him holding an unusual record in Irish broadcasting. During the 2007 election campaign, he referred to then taoiseach Bertie Ahern as "a motherf**ker". He thought the remark would be edited out as "vulgar abuse", but because of the broadcasting rules that are enforced for the three weeks before a general reaction, the remark was left in and considered to be "political comment".
Because of what he calls "the peculiar Anglo-Saxon fetish for quiz and panel shows", he has become a familiar face on TV, with regular appearances on the likes of Have I Got News for Youand Mock the Week, and he is a permanent guest on Sky's new panel show, Wall of Fame. On the small screen, he reverts to laddish mode, doing meat-and-two-veg material for a mainstream crowd. On stage, he digs deeper for challenging and recondite gags. The last bit of new material he was working up was based on his discovery that the composer Edward Elgar, being so vain he wanted to approve his official death photos, faked his own death.
If he pulls off the big prize in Edinburgh tonight, the next time the BBC comes calling for him it will likely be for his own TV series. Maxwell says he plans to keep returning to Edinburgh – “the Olympics for clowns”, as he calls it – until he drops. Then, unable to leave the lure of a live audience behind him, he wants to finish his career as a comic on cruise ships.
Curriculum vitae
Who is he?Andrew Maxwell, the self-styled only Protestant in the village of Kilbarrack.
Why is he in the news?He's the hot favourite to carry off the big comedy prize at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe tonight, potentially following in the footsteps of previous winners Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Steve Coogan.
Typical jokeOn the UK riots: "Black kids in London, asian kids in Birmingham, white kids in Manchester – a scumbag rainbow."
Little-known factHe used to warm up the audience for Jonathan Ross's TV show.
