Fresh from writing and starring in his acclaimed RTE sitcom Good Boy, Ireland’s second-best comedian Tony Cantwell brings his hilarious show You Cry Weird to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
What makes you cry and what does that say about you?
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever cried at that didn’t make it into the show because you thought, “No, that’s too embarrassing” – and then realised it probably wasn’t?
When I was like 26, I got mad drunk and smashed my phone for the third time in a year. The next morning hanging out my arse, I called the insurance company, who told me I’d smashed it too many times to get another one, and I cried so hard that they just sent me a new phone. Highly effective, but too pathetic to keep the respect of a paying audience.
You describe the show as a search for identity, masculinity and emotional honesty. Did therapy answer any of your questions, or did it just give you more material for future Fringe shows?
When you start therapy, you think it’s about removing all the bad feelings so that you can be happy all the time. What actually happens is you just investigate, accept and live with the bad feelings. It’s like going to hospital cause you got a wrench stuck up your arse, and you’re just getting quized for why you put it up there. Then you leave with a pamphlet that reads ‘Living with a wrench up your arse’.
There seems to be a recurring theme of your knob causing emotional distress. At what point did you realise this wasn’t just a subplot but a full-blown narrative arc?
Because I’m Irish, I have an allergic reaction to complimenting myself, so this is difficult to say out loud. But when I was a teenager, getting changed after PE, some lads in my class saw my knob and announced that I had a big one. And I cried. I was so happy. My mother also wept when she heard the news. I spent years thinking I could never possibly stand on a stage and tell that story. But the show is about crying hard at the strangest things, and that was the strangest.
You famously set a bully’s bike on fire with Lynx Africa. Looking back, was that an act of revenge, performance art, or simply Ireland’s most aggressive deodorant advert?
Pure revenge. There’s a French concept – l’esprit de l’escalier – the wit of the staircase, thinking of what you should have said too late. I was caught in a situation where I had no comeback. So I set his bike on fire. I should feel bad, but I am so grateful I don’t have to live with the regret of not having a comeback.
The show asks what makes us cry and what that says about us. What worries you more: someone who cries at Bluey or someone who watches Bluey and feels absolutely nothing?
I think it’s medically impossible to not feel something watching Bluey. You know the sociopath test; where a woman meets a man at her mother’s funeral, falls in love, they part ways, and the next day she kills her sister. The idea being that a psychopath would immediately deduce that killing the sister creates another funeral, which means another chance to see this man, likely a family friend. I think should hook people up to an MRI machine make people watch Bluey. If nothing happens, psycho.
You’ve described masculinity as fragile, childhood grudges as forever, and talking to your friends as potentially catastrophic. Are you trying to help men, or just scare them into therapy?
I’d rather scare the men into going to therapy. So we don’t have another generation of men, going for a jog not knowing they’ve wrenches in their arses.