The Fool on the Hill

“Here’s to legitimate excuses for drinking!” declares Andrew Maxwell as we grab a table in a Camden beer garden.

The Irishman has done well out of pub banter in recent years: a routine centred around a bar stool and a pint of stout saw him nominated for the If.comedy Award in 2007, and he enjoyed more rave reviews at last year’s Fringe with another show transparently inspired by the Dublin boozers of his youth – “just drinking and lying.” Fifteen years on from his Edinburgh debut, however, Maxwell’s clearly itching for a change of direction. “I want to destroy that,” he says. “There’ll be no bar stool, there’ll be no fucking anecdotes. I’m gonna have to be physical, move around the stage.”

This emphasis on reinvention is a recurring theme. For all the youthful exuberance radiating from his 5' 6'' frame, at 35 Maxwell seems haunted by the prospect of drifting into a stagnant, middle-aged comfort zone. “It’s maintaining that hunger, making sure you don’t get that slow creep of contempt into what you do. You see guys who become dead behind the eyes – just churning it out. Become a mortgage comic. That’s the real fucking hell, man.”

Maxwell’s eagerness to keep busy has drawn him into a range of ventures: a regular night at London’s Comedy Store, Fullmooners, complete with breakdancers and werewolf howls; Altitude, a comedy festival in the Swiss Alps going strong after its second year; a new internet business aimed at bringing in fresh comic blood to address a perceived dearth of youngsters in stand up. But he looks set to throw as much energy as ever into his 2009 Edinburgh show.

Entitled The Lamp, this year’s offering hangs loosely around the principle that we should be careful what we wish for. “The big event since the last time I did Edinburgh,” reflects Maxwell, “has been Obama – it’s this massive piece of wish fulfilment, on all sorts of fucking levels. But Osama bin Laden was wish fulfilment for the Americans in the 80s; they were like, ‘We’ve got this cunt that’ll fight the Russians for us.’ They didn’t think that once you rub the lamp and the genie comes out he’s not going back in. And the consequences of actions can fucking go on for fucking ever.”

Amid the endearingly instinctive profanity (Maxwell says “fuck” roughly as often as most people blink) lurks an unmistakeably passionate political voice. Indeed, according to comedycv.co.uk, the Irishman is not so much a comedian as “an intrepid social commentator and political protagonist on a mission to liberate minds.” Such accolades don’t go down well with their subject. “The last thing in the world I wanna be is taken fucking seriously,” insists Maxwell. “Just 'cause you have a salient political opinion, you have people saying—and they mean it as a compliment—‘you should go into politics.’ But they have no idea what a cunt they’ve just called you! I’m the fool on the hill, like,” he concludes cheerfully.

That modest self-assessment is belied by the remainder of the interview, which sees Maxwell holding forth on political issues from apartheid South Africa to the empowerment of the mob during the Allied invasion of Sicily. “This has nothing to do with comedy,” he says at one point, almost apologetically – adding to the sense of a self-declared “clown” labouring to maintain his light-hearted credentials. Fortunately, Maxwell’s funny enough to get away with it – as when he pulls back from a heartfelt assault on the BNP to declare: “Human beings have an enormous sexual desire for each other. So even if we can have a massive distaste for each other’s cultures, our loins will join!”

Maxwell’s political awareness is unsurprising, after his upbringing as a Protestant in a resolutely Sinn Fein-supporting area of Dublin – “during the hunger strikes, there were black flags on every lamp post,” he remembers. The more carefree world of BBC light entertainment gave the young Maxwell his break in the mid-1990s, with warm-up duties for Jonathan Ross and work for the short-lived Sunday Show that included a sample of life as a male escort. But it’s the Fringe, as much as anything else, that got him where he is today.

“There’s nothing even remotely as intense in the world of performance,” he says. “Your mental and physical health are impaired to fuck – but that’s all part of it. It’s intoxicating. You put 100,000 fucking showoffs into a medieval city for a month, there’s gonna be a lot of debauchery.”

Won’t the debauchery be slightly more restrained this year, and the crowds stingier, what with all this ‘Age of Austerity’ business? Maxwell sounds bullish. “If anything, in a recession, people don’t necessarily spend less, they just spend with more regard to what the fuck they’re doing. If something’s good, they’ll go see it.”

Maxwell’s no more impressed by that other Edinburgh controversy, the Edinburgh Comedy Festival – a venture launched by the four biggest Fringe venues that, according to traditionalists, spells the beginning of the end of Edinburgh’s humble values. “A lot of in-house nattering,” he sniffs. “No-one on the outside gives a shit. What we now know as Edinburgh could be a fucking village compared to ten years time. My only concern would be that the festival would stratify too much – a talented act could be a smash hit but there would be no way to break through to the league above. But I don’t think that’ll happen.”

It’s a characteristically measured assessment from a comic who—for all his denial of any political agenda—apparently sees crap-cutting as part of his job description. “A comedian is the little kid in the crowd, going: ‘The emperor’s fucking naked!’ You don’t have to be overtly political in the way that Mark Thomas is, or occasionally I am. It’s the same with Morecambe and Wise – the general instinct to point out the absurdity of the serious, of the grown-ups as it were.

“People try to deconstruct comedy all the time,” Maxwell continues; “it’s like pulling Santa’s beard off. We all know this cunt hasn’t rode in on a sleigh!”

Andrew Maxwell - The Lamp Pleasance Courtyard 8-31 Aug (not 12 or 19), 9.00pm, £15