Jake O’Kane - ‘Musk and Trump are the stuff of nightmares’. The Belfast comedian on grappling with technology, politics and physical pain with new show Absent Intelligence

“THE punchline is that immigrants saved Trump’s life,” explains Jake O’Kane of the irony involved in the first of two failed assassination attempts on the current President-elect this year.

“At the very second that he was shot at, he turned his head to look at a screenshot of the level of immigration under Biden.

“If he hadn’t turned his head to look at that screenshot, he was gone. A lot of people don’t realise that, but it’s true - you can look it up.

“And that image of him afterwards, with his fist in the air - ‘fight, fight, fight!’ - basically got him elected.”

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Jake O’Kane - ‘Musk and Trump are the stuff of nightmares’. The Belfast comedian on grappling with technology, politics and physical pain with new show Absent Intelligence

He adds: “My wife doesn’t listen anything I say now, because I told her Brexit would never pass and Trump would never get elected.”

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My wife doesn’t listen anything I say now, because I told her Brexit would never pass and Trump would never get elected

—  Jake O'Kane

We’re talking Trump because Jake will be on the road with his new stand-up tour, Absent Intelligence, when the 47th President, soon-to-be the 49th President of the United States is inaugurated on January 6 - no doubt under the tightest security ever seen at such an event.

Thus, it’s entirely possible that the mix of personal and topical/political material people get at Theatre at The Mill in Newtownabbey on January 4 could be very, very different to the show at the Portico of Ards in Portaferry on January 10, should another American gun nut decide to use Trump’s luminous orange, straw-topped melon for target practice in-between.

“You have a country that has more guns than it has people,” marvels Jake of the US, a favourite annual holiday destination for the O’Kanes - but not this year, and not because of Trump.

Despite looking a good deal younger than his true early-60s vintage, those who have caught Jake’s last couple of stand-up tours will know that the north Belfast-based comedian’s health has been erratic of late.

While he’s happy to mine his failing eyesight, rebellious digestive tract and recent ADHD diagnosis for comedic purposes, it seems the return of an old powerlifting injury from his teens earlier this year was definitely no laughing matter.

“I was waiting four hours in the ambulance just to get into the hospital,” sighs the comedian of how the sudden and immobilising flare-up of an old spinal injury resulted in a 12-hour overnight stint in hospital, where he used up all the available gas and air in an effort to alleviate his excruciating pain.

“I also had two doses of morphine, which had no effect,” he tells me.

“And that’s when you’re really sort of thinking ‘I am f***ed’ - because that’s scary biscuits. It was the worst pain I’ve ever had in my life.

“So, I lost my holiday due to the back. God love my family. We were off to Florida. And I was supposed to be going to see Springsteen in London, which was my Christmas present from last year - but I couldn’t get on a plane.”

He adds: “At this age, your health is like wac-a-mole in that you cure something but that causes something else.

“The anti-inflammatories they gave me for my back turned me into a human slurry spreader. It was like s***ting 20 gallons of the worst Guinness ever bought.”

Happily, an MRI scan, a cortisone injection and regular physiotherapy now have Jake rehabilitated to the degree that he will be able to tour as planned from the end of this month and into the new year.

His Absent Intelligence show mixes his usual observations about current affairs, personal ailments, family matters and stuff that has really, really annoyed him of late - like the scarily rapid rate of technological advancement, and the even scarier people at its controls.

“There have always been technocrats,” explains Jake, who has recently started a Patreon account to allow paid subscribers early access to his regular online videos commenting on topical matters and, more importantly, “annoying those who need to be annoyed”.

“Men have always been there. But in the past, it’s been newspaper editors, it’s been the Maxwells and Murdochs of the world, you know.

But my kids don’t even watch the news. A lot of the world that I grew up in is gone, and some of it’s very good like advancements in medicine and all that there.

“But guys like Elon Musk at the right hand of a dangerous megalomaniac like Trump, who’s a demagogue of the highest order. That’s the stuff of nightmares.

“So it’s interesting times, because, as you know, there’s a shift in the media - there’s a complete shift.

“That’s why I’m interested in technology and artificial intelligence and all that there. Because it’s impacting all our lives and there’s going to be swathes of unemployment.

“[Comedians and journalists] will always be okay, because there’s a degree of imagination and creativity to what we do - but taxi drivers are gone, delivery drivers are gone. So many jobs are just going to be gone.

“I remember the first time I got in a car with GPS. It was like f***ing witchcraft. For somebody of my generation, it was voodoo stuff.

“What’s happening now is again going to be a seismic shift. This is one of those moments in history where everything changes.

“Every aspect of life is going to change, how we interact with each other and how we interact with the world around us is all going to change - because this stuff is learning, and that’s a danger. That’s the frightening bit about it.

“Obviously, I’m going for the comedic end of it, where I’m just trying to grapple with the new reality of answering the phone on your watch and all this s***e that was science fiction when I was growing up.

“Basically, how an old man like me fails to integrate with this new world.”

Expect all that and a little bit of local politics too - though not as much as in the bad old days when Jake’s annual stand-up show was pretty much an Irish News-assisted month-by-month review of the entire year just gone.

You can blame/thank the long absences of a sitting Assembly at Stormont for the comedian’s gradual return to material of a more personal nature, as he explains.

“There was no politics here,” explains Jake.

“I couldn’t do a political review of the year when there was no politics. So I had to adapt.

“All I’ve done now is I’ve went back to stand-up.”

Finally, something to thank our MLAs for.

Jake O’Kane: Absent Intelligence begins on December 27 at Marine Hotel, Ballycastle and includes dates at Derry’s Millennium Forum on January 2, and The Ulster Hall in Belfast on January 25 and February 8. Full tour dates and ticket links available via davidhullpromotions.com. Follow Jake online at youtube.com/@JakeOKaneComic, patreon.com/jakeokane and jakeokane.com.