Irish comedian Jimeoin got his first big laugh before he reached the punchline.
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The comic was 22 and living in Sydney when a friend put his name down to do a bit at a comedy night.
Six months later he had earned enough from comedy to consider going full time.
Jimeoin will bring his show Renonsense Man to Her Majesty’s Theatre on Saturday, June 3.
“I can remember starting a joke and then everyone laughing at the fact that I was telling a joke and I thought they were laughing because they’d already heard the joke,” he says.
“So I started telling another joke, and they laughed at that, and that was how naive I was to the whole thing.
“It was very funny to the audience, and I can see now it was very funny to the audience.”
Politics is “conspicuous in its absence” from his comedy, he says.
“I grew up in a place where there was a full-on war where anytime you heard my accent, it was someone talking about the Troubles,” Jimeoin, who was born in Warwickshire, England and grew up in Northern Ireland, says.
“We had a lot of background noise, everything was to do with the Troubles and it was great to say, there’s something more than that when you hear our accent.”
Jimeoin’s Northern Irish accent, which at home had been a red rag for debate, was an “asset” in Australia.
“To go to a place where people loved you for being Irish, it was an asset to have an Irish accent. It was nice to have people seeing it in a nice light.
To go to a place where people loved you for being Irish, it was an asset to have an Irish accent. It was nice to have people seeing it in a nice light.
- Comedian Jimeoin
“If you’re continually talking about why you’re blowing things up - it became the only subject matter that you get related it with.”
More than 20 years on from his first gig Jimeoin says he still works something new into each show – sandwiched between bits he knows will get a laugh.
“I know I just have to work at it more than anything else - if you don’t work on it you lose it. I would never do a brand new show, I would never put an audience through that.
“I’ve done nights where I go on with my book and I start the show with my book and the audience knows this is me doing new s***.”
Jimeoin will perform at Her Majesty’s Theatre on Saturday, June 3. To book visit www.hermaj.com.