Jon Kenny’s guitar is left up on top of the coffee table in his sitting room. Before the arrival of Irish Country Living he had been playing a bit of music, not for any particular reason, just jamming away by himself.
Most famous for being one half of comedy duo the D’Unbelievables, Jon explains that he was originally a musician, playing with a band and doing solo gigs before getting into comedy.
“I fell into comedy through music. Probably people were laughing at me because I wasn’t much good at the music: ‘This fella can’t be serious,’ they’d say.
“I was singing with a band for years before I got into comedy. That was a lifetime ago, it would have been back in the 1970s and into the 1980s.”
He then joined Theatre Omnibus, a physical theatre company. After finishing with them and going back gigging, Jon found that his performances had become a lot more physical and comedy worked its way very naturally into his sets.
With Pat Shortt, he then went on to form the D’Unbelievables, whose sketches still live on today.
D’Tour
Touring as part of the D’Unbelievables was great fun, Jon remembers fondly.
They played every nook and cranny in Ireland, he says and if there was no venue, there was no problem: “In the early days, we used to bring shows to places where there wouldn’t even be venues.
“A shed, a hall, a cattle mart: you name it and we’ve done it. There was great fun in that, creating your own venue. We did a lot of it, a lot of the ground work.
"It kind of all paid off, even before we got into major theatre venues, we were always on the fringes mullocking around creating our own venues. Then when we got into the bigger places the people came with us.”
These days Jon is still touring, but he tends to stick to more formal venues than cattle marts.
He and Mary McEvoy, who played Biddy in Glenroe, currently perform two plays, The Successful TD and The Matchmaker, which were adapted from John B Keane books (there is now talk of them doing a third).
Jon Kenny and Mary McEvoy in The Matchmaker by JB Keane, directed by Michael Scott.
Irish towns have a great theatre structure, but it is hard for shows to tour them, the funny man believes: “Not an awful lot of acts tour with a show compared to years ago, because of the financial constrains. It’s difficult to get a piece on tour at the moment and to get it to travel the country, which is a pity.
“The thing is, we have an infrastructure there that we never had before. We have good theatres in provincial towns. We were in Ennis the other night. Glór is as good a venue as you would get in any city, anywhere in the world.”
The entertainer says he can see himself staying in acting for a while and, after countless years in comedy, it was nice to take a break.
However, he still speaks very warmly of his funny days, especially the characters that were created, who were everyday Irish people. Jon believes that being Irish naturally lends itself to being a comic.
Humour is something that is stitched into everything we do in this country. I think we are an awfully colourful race of people altogether and we have a mad way of looking at things. That is something I really hope we never lose.
“There is a madness inside us. I always say there is kind of an acceptable level of insanity in Ireland, that is just on the edge of being funny or stone-mad, I think we exist somewhere along that line.”
Being Positive
Jon’s positive outlook on life is remarkable. Nearly 16 years ago, the Limerick man was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
I ask what advice he would give to someone in the same situation as he was. His answer is very telling of his mindset: be positive, because that is all you can be.
“I always say there are no rules,” explains Jon. “We are very lucky, some treatments are hard, but at the same time at least we have them. We are very lucky that we can be treated for a lot of stuff.
“If you take that as the starting block and say: ‘Aren’t I lucky that I am diagnosed and aren’t I lucky that I’m going to be treated.’
"That sounds very basic, but at the same time there are an awful lot of places in the world where you may not be lucky enough to be diagnosed and you may not be lucky enough to be treated.”
Fully recovered and still on the road, Jon is and always has been a prime example of the joy that can be found from enjoying the little things in life, like music, laughter and always looking on the bright side.
Read more
Living life: meeting Mary McEvoy
An Irish man on Irish mammies
Jon Kenny’s guitar is left up on top of the coffee table in his sitting room. Before the arrival of Irish Country Living he had been playing a bit of music, not for any particular reason, just jamming away by himself.
Most famous for being one half of comedy duo the D’Unbelievables, Jon explains that he was originally a musician, playing with a band and doing solo gigs before getting into comedy.
“I fell into comedy through music. Probably people were laughing at me because I wasn’t much good at the music: ‘This fella can’t be serious,’ they’d say.
“I was singing with a band for years before I got into comedy. That was a lifetime ago, it would have been back in the 1970s and into the 1980s.”
He then joined Theatre Omnibus, a physical theatre company. After finishing with them and going back gigging, Jon found that his performances had become a lot more physical and comedy worked its way very naturally into his sets.
With Pat Shortt, he then went on to form the D’Unbelievables, whose sketches still live on today.
D’Tour
Touring as part of the D’Unbelievables was great fun, Jon remembers fondly.
They played every nook and cranny in Ireland, he says and if there was no venue, there was no problem: “In the early days, we used to bring shows to places where there wouldn’t even be venues.
“A shed, a hall, a cattle mart: you name it and we’ve done it. There was great fun in that, creating your own venue. We did a lot of it, a lot of the ground work.
"It kind of all paid off, even before we got into major theatre venues, we were always on the fringes mullocking around creating our own venues. Then when we got into the bigger places the people came with us.”
These days Jon is still touring, but he tends to stick to more formal venues than cattle marts.
He and Mary McEvoy, who played Biddy in Glenroe, currently perform two plays, The Successful TD and The Matchmaker, which were adapted from John B Keane books (there is now talk of them doing a third).
Jon Kenny and Mary McEvoy in The Matchmaker by JB Keane, directed by Michael Scott.
Irish towns have a great theatre structure, but it is hard for shows to tour them, the funny man believes: “Not an awful lot of acts tour with a show compared to years ago, because of the financial constrains. It’s difficult to get a piece on tour at the moment and to get it to travel the country, which is a pity.
“The thing is, we have an infrastructure there that we never had before. We have good theatres in provincial towns. We were in Ennis the other night. Glór is as good a venue as you would get in any city, anywhere in the world.”
The entertainer says he can see himself staying in acting for a while and, after countless years in comedy, it was nice to take a break.
However, he still speaks very warmly of his funny days, especially the characters that were created, who were everyday Irish people. Jon believes that being Irish naturally lends itself to being a comic.
Humour is something that is stitched into everything we do in this country. I think we are an awfully colourful race of people altogether and we have a mad way of looking at things. That is something I really hope we never lose.
“There is a madness inside us. I always say there is kind of an acceptable level of insanity in Ireland, that is just on the edge of being funny or stone-mad, I think we exist somewhere along that line.”
Being Positive
Jon’s positive outlook on life is remarkable. Nearly 16 years ago, the Limerick man was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
I ask what advice he would give to someone in the same situation as he was. His answer is very telling of his mindset: be positive, because that is all you can be.
“I always say there are no rules,” explains Jon. “We are very lucky, some treatments are hard, but at the same time at least we have them. We are very lucky that we can be treated for a lot of stuff.
“If you take that as the starting block and say: ‘Aren’t I lucky that I am diagnosed and aren’t I lucky that I’m going to be treated.’
"That sounds very basic, but at the same time there are an awful lot of places in the world where you may not be lucky enough to be diagnosed and you may not be lucky enough to be treated.”
Fully recovered and still on the road, Jon is and always has been a prime example of the joy that can be found from enjoying the little things in life, like music, laughter and always looking on the bright side.
Read more
Living life: meeting Mary McEvoy
An Irish man on Irish mammies
SHARING OPTIONS