My Childhood with Bernard Casey: After my first comedy set I knew it was the life for me

Chatty, imaginative child Bernard now a stand-up guy

Casey was an imaginative child, and when chatting to those elderly relatives he would often assume a character.

Listen to Bernard Casey’s comedy and you’ll hear echoes of his childhood in Kerry. The characters in his stand-up routines and online videos are inspired by conversations he had with people he knew when he was growing up in Portmagee.

Casey is the youngest of four children, with a six-year gap between him and the second-youngest, Lorraine.

His brothers, Jonathan and Adrian, are eight and seven years older than him.

“I was very much the baby, and my earliest memories involve wandering around the village, talking to everyone,” he says. “Both my grandparents came from big families, and I had grandaunts and uncles around the place. I’d mostly chat with them.”

Casey dressed as Dinny from Glenroe at the Portmagee Fancy Dress party in 1993. Age 3

Casey was an imaginative child, and when chatting to those elderly relatives he would often assume a character.

“They’d greet me as Bernard, but I’d say: ‘I’m not Bernard. I’m Jimmy Dan.’ Then I’d spend the rest of the conversation pretending to be Jimmy.”

His father, Johnny, was a fisherman, and Casey went through a phase of being obsessed with boats. He spent hours on the pier and could recognise the local boats by the sound of their engine.

He was so fixated on boats that whenever he was given a sandwich to eat, he’d “nibble it in to the shape of a boat and play with it on my plate”.

His next obsession, Gaelic football, was kick-started when his brothers made him a goalkeeper while they practised shooting penalties. Casey laughs as he describes “having no choice but to get good, when I had teenage lads driving balls at me”.

His passion for football intensified at Coláiste na Sceilge secondary school, where the Kerry manager Jack O’Connor was a teacher. Casey was a member of the team that O’Connor led to a Hogan Cup win in 2009.

After sitting his Leaving Certificate at 17 in 2009, Casey was due to start college that autumn. But O’Connor convinced him and a few others to do a local post-Leaving Cert course, so they could continue playing football for the school.

Casey visiting Santa in Tralee in December 2000. Age 10

Casey is glad he spent that extra year at home. “It was great craic. I had fun with my friends and went stone mad for football. We won the county cup and the All-Ireland and played in Croke Park, which is every young lad’s dream.”

He also got to spend more time with his parents. Some of his fondest memories of his father date from those secondary school years, when they would take trips to All-Ireland semi-finals and finals.

“It would be me, my sister, my brothers, Dad, and a neighbour or friend of Dad’s in the car. They would tell stories about the places we’d travel through, and we’d stop at random restaurants for a bite to eat. Great times.”

Casey’s mother, Eileen, worked for a local development company, and his childhood memories of her involve “lots of chatting”. The pair would go to the shops or to visit her friends together and Casey says they would chat “the whole time. She is caring and fun and always good for a one-liner.”

Though naturally imaginative and chatty, it took him some time to consider building a career on those qualities. He was academically inclined and initially planned to become a teacher, studying history and geography at University College Cork.

Yet he always enjoyed telling jokes, an art form he had learned from his older brothers.

Casey says: “One of them studied computers in Tralee in 2001 and would come home at weekends to pass on jokes he’d looked up on joke websites.

“It makes it sound like the dark ages: The brother going to Tralee, finding the joke and bringing it back to Portmagee. But that’s how it was, and that’s how I got good at telling jokes and stories.”

The leaders of his local youth club recognised his talent and encouraged Casey and his friends to take part in a comedy sketch that they ended up bringing to the All-Ireland Variety Show, which they won.

Casey has a vivid recollection of performing that sketch to 200 people in Maynooth. “The belly laughs in that room,” he says. “They had such an effect on me.

Casey's graduation day from Scoil Bhreannain NS Portmagee in June 2002. Age 12

Afterwards, he and his friends were often asked to write and perform sketches for local variety shows. Every time they did, Casey would think to himself how much he would like to perform for a living.

“But I still didn’t think to apply to study acting or anything like that at university,” he says. “I think I paid too much attention to old fellas telling me there was no work in it and I’d end up serving tables in coffee shops.”

It took him until he was 20 and in his final year of college to give stand-up a go. He saw a sign advertising a comedy society meeting at 7pm on a Tuesday and remembers a voice in his head saying, ‘If you don’t go now, you’ll never go’. So I went.”

At the meeting, he was given a basic introduction to stand-up and told to prepare five minutes of material for the following week. He did, and it went well.

Shortly after that, the comedy society was asked to put on a show for Rag Week. The show changed everything for Casey. He enjoyed it so much that by the end of his set, his future was decided. “No more history or geography. Comedy was the life for me.”

• ‘Local Gossip: Tall Tales and Short Stories From Over the Road’, by Bernard Casey, will be published by Gill Books on October 15.
• See bernardcasey.com for details of his upcoming comedy shows