Jonny & the Baptists on Eat The Poor
As musical comedy act Jonny & the Baptists tour their hit show Eat the Poor, the satirical duo's Paddy Gervers tells us about deliberately taking a political show to people and places with different views
If we start a conversation about wealth inequality here, on the pages of an arts magazine, it’s bound to set some eyes rolling. The same applies to comedians discussing it in well-furnished theatres where the beer costs as much as the bar staff’s hourly wage. For Jonny & the Baptists, this means that their new show, Eat the Poor, had to be more than a collection of songs to tickle angry lefties.
“It’s very easy, especially in satire, to have a show that says, ‘Here’s a problem, what a shame,'” says Paddy Gervers. “We wanted to have something that at least tried to say, ‘Here’s one way of dealing with it.’”
Eat the Poor is half collected satirical songs and half storytelling, eventually turning into “a kind of musical-theatre-comedy-horror apocalyptic dream sequence.” We see an hour-long story of a loving friendship torn apart by greed, chance and Andrew Lloyd Webber. In a dystopian view of the future, Jonny Donahue is wildly rich, while Paddy Gervers has become homeless and ignored by his former partner.
“The second you become homeless, one of the first things that goes is communication and feeling like you’re connected with the world around you,” Gervers says, speaking from experience gleaned from running music groups at Oxford’s Crisis homeless centre. The pair are planning on running similar groups around the country both for research and to spend some time playing music. “No one is labelled as homeless or vulnerable, you’re just a group of people hanging out. From what we’ve learned, that’s one of the things that is really missing.”
As well as taking the time to understand the world they're singing about, the pair have made a concerted effort to find audiences who don’t vote the same way as them. “We’ve been accused of preaching to the converted by both The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, and I think that sentence shows a real misunderstanding of what it is they do. We previewed this show only in right-wing strongholds. It holds up as a show and people don’t come out feeling targeted. We want to start finding common ground and finding things that we can all share our opinion on in a forum that is comedy.”
This forum is something that Donahue and Gervers create in their shows: “At the end, we say if anyone has anything they want to talk about, you’re welcome to, and that has been fascinating. It’s a great opportunity to have a discussion and to learn about each other. You get that little bit of local knowledge that helps you get a better picture of the rest of the country.”
So what can we non-millionaires do about wealth inequality in the UK? Gervers and Donahue recommend personal action as a solid starting point: “We propose giving up your inheritance so we can all get back to a level playing field. The show confirms that that’s what Jonny and I are going to do.” These relatively small actions that build up can create a bottom-up solution rather than a top-down governmental one. “When everyone in power is looking the other way, you have to start with yourself.”
Trying to stay positive while detailing the lives of the least fortunate in our society is a tricky job, but Jonny & the Baptists manage to do it. Their material moves from fact-checked headline statistics to down-to-earth analysis via good old-fashioned surrealism, and all with a fantastic soundtrack made up of songs which merit listening to outside of the show as well.
“Because of Brexit and Trump and having a country that is hugely divided over what seems to be a sort of schoolboy argument that got out of hand, it’s incredibly tough to point out anything more ridiculous," Gervers says. "We [as comedians] have had one of our powers taken away – the power to make things ridiculous through humour.” Can comedians and comedy fans do other things to challenge the status quo? “We have to find different ways of doing that. Perhaps one of those ways is engaging more with the community around you.”
Jonny & the Baptists: Eat the Poor, The Stand, Edinburgh, 23 May; The Stand, Glasgow, 24 May; The Civic, Barnsley, 26 May; The Lowry, Salford, 27 May
Paddy Gervers also co-hosts Podshambles