Born: December 12th, 1957
Died: November 15th, 2024
Jon Kenny, who has died at the age of 66, was one of Ireland’s most beloved comedians. His humour fondly celebrated archetypes of small-town and rural Ireland but was often electrified by a surrealist streak suggestive of a more uproarious Flann O’Brien. He was also a respected screen actor, appearing both in comedies such as Father Ted and straight dramas including Angela’s Ashes and Les Misérables and the Oscar-nominated animation Wolf Walkers.
Kenny, from Hospital, Co Limerick, will be best remembered as one half of the D’Unbelievables, a duo he began with Pat Shortt in the late 1980s. They met when Kenny was looking for a saxophone player to add a splash to his comedy routines. They hit it off, and after several months of coaxing, Shortt, saxophone in tow, agreed to join his collaborator on stage.
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They were a chalk-and-cheese pairing. Kenny was naturally voluble, always with a gag or impersonation to hand, while Shortt could be shy when the spotlight was off. In an early interview on Bibi Baskin’s RTÉ chatshow, it is Kenny who does most of the talking and tells all the jokes, while Shortt plays the straight man.
But Kenny wasn’t just a natural comedian. He was a talented musician who continued to write and perform songs throughout his life. He also had a successful screen career. The parts tended to be cameos – but he always made the most of them. In a 1996 episode of Father Ted, he carved out a piece of Irish comedy history as Eurovision presenter Fred Rickwood – a hilariously baroque figure who rambled incoherently offstage yet was as slick as lightning when the cameras rolled.
He will be forever associated with Father Ted but he excelled in straight parts too. As brutish Thénardier, he traded lines with Liam Neeson’s Jean Valjean in a 1988 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. He voiced a woodcutter in Wolf Walkers and portrayed Gerry the fiddler in Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, his deadpan performance a perfect conduit for McDonagh’s bittersweet dialogue.
Kenny was born in 1957 in Hospital, 30km south of Limerick city. He had a brother, Tom, and sisters, Anne, Joan and Deirdre. His parents ran a family drapery on the main street and a pub at the opposite side of the town. Kenny’s father, John, died when Jon was young, and his mother, Mary, raised the family while running the business. “She was an amazing woman,” he would later say. “I don’t think I realised it at the time, how difficult it was.”
His childhood in Hospital would prove a huge influence on his comedy. A shop in rural Ireland was the perfect ringside seat from which to observe the quirks of ordinary people. It helped him develop an ear for the eccentricities and joys of small-town life.
Kenny had dyslexia as a child and left school before his 16th birthday to pursue his love of performance. The following year he and some friends formed the glam rock group Gimik. With Kenny playing bass and singing, they made a splash, appearing on Shay Healy’s Hullaballoo on RTÉ and supporting the Bay City Rollers around Ireland. But they were a band out of lockstep with the emerging punk scene – as they soon discovered.
“There were times when we were in places we shouldn’t have been at all,” Kenny told Hot Press in 2003. “You’d sit down and look out at the audience and say, “what the f***” are we doing here. There’s 400 punks at the gig and here we are doing glam rock!”
Gimik would break up within a few years. In 1983 Kenny joined Limerick’s improvisational dance company, Theatre Omnibus. He was also becoming successful as a stand-up, carving out a career through sheer force of will at a time when Ireland was a comedy backwater.
“I was on a stand-up circuit that did not exist,” he remembered. “I was young and slightly insane. Here was me going around wearing TV sets around my head, riding pantomime horses. Once at a gig, I drove in on a Honda 50 ... down the audience.”
He crossed paths with Pat Shortt, from Thurles, on the small midwest comedy scene. Some of their earliest shows together were at Costello’s Tavern in Limerick, where owner Flan Costello offered the scrappy duo a midweek gig aimed at students. They were soon packing the upstairs room, and after a memorable performance as two confused gardaí on Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show, became a sensation across the country.
Kenny’s characters were often based on people he knew from Limerick. In an interview with Hot Press, he explained how a Costa del Sol lounge singer named Pablo Maloney, who became part of his solo routine, was an amalgam of real-life individuals.
“He was actually a composite of two different people,” he said. “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.”
D’Unbelievables were one of the biggest names in Irish comedy, their rise coinciding with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger. Suddenly people had money to spend on luxuries such as a night out at a comedy show and Kenny and Shortt played to packed houses all year round. There was no let-up – until Kenny was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2000 and took a step back.
“I go to take a holiday and I’m not feeling the best and I get checked and they tell me I have cancer,” he told RTÉ in 2022. “I had to stop. I wasn’t able to do it, even emotionally I couldn’t do it.” He felt that overwork had led him to neglect his health.
“It’s so frantic, you just keep doing it but there was something inside saying, ‘you should take a break’. My body was suffering because of it. I wasn’t going to go back to it.”
He had to stop performing while receiving treatment, though he would return to a successful solo career. He and Shortt reunited for a sell-out D’Unbelievables tour in 2011.
Kenny and his wife Margy lived in Dublin for many years before returning to Limerick and an estate located in a 20-acre forest close to scenic Lough Gur, 10 kilometres from Hospital.
Kenny was not the first comedian to look to small-town Ireland for inspiration. But his portraits of Irish eccentricity were frequently mingled with sadness. In an early D’Unbelievables show, One Hell of a Do, he played a character named Martin – an overbearing drunk whose ceaseless patter was gradually revealed to be a cover for the deep loneliness he felt after the death of his wife.
“It’s about people ... people are funny,” he would say of his comedic philosophy. “We are all funny. People do funny things. We just exaggerate it.”
He is survived by wife Margy, children Aran and Laya, and sisters Anne, Joan and Deirdre.