'I was lucky to be loved like that': Fred Cooke and Julie Jay talk stand up, family and losing a parent

“It’s chaos, but we make it work. We use Google Calendar — that’s our thing. We’re literally going on numbers and dots; I’m the blue dots and Julie’s the red. At times we overlap and we just talk through that,” explains Fred.

“It’s a lot of organisation. And I think neither myself or Fred are naturally organised as people. So often, even this week, we had a calendar clash, and it is a bit of a Solomon’s choice, because invariably, one person has to reschedule,” says Julie.

“I know I’m to blame for a lot of that. I’ll put things into the calendar without saying it to Julie,” Fred jumps in.

“And you do have that terrible habit of putting something in with a question mark. It’ll be a tentative, Limerick, question mark,” laughs Julie.

Their pals on the road, the likes of Deirdre O’Kane and Tommy Tiernan, who’ve been through similar organisational dilemmas, have helped Julie and Fred see it for what it is. 

“When your kids are this small, it’s a moment in time and it will change,” says Julie.

“Tommy said to me last year ‘you’re in the height of it now Fred’. And he should know, he’s got six kids. But I won’t complain, because we’re so blessed.

“I think now I’ve found a sweet spot between enjoying life and work and having a lovely family. So I’m happy to travel and work around our schedules.”

Julie says that Fred loves to travel, loves being on the road. 

“Maybe it’s because you learned to drive quite late in life?” she ponders.

“Yeah, I love all of it — being on the road but also getting from A to B. I don’t need to go to a lovely part of the Alps, like, I’m delighted to go anywhere. This week alone, I’m gigging in Peterborough in England and then I’m in Bandon the next day.”

“And it’s funny, because neither of us have any concept of English geography,” says Julie. “I definitely think we need to buy a map of not just Ireland, but the UK, because, again, there’ll be something on the Google Calendar, like ‘England’, and it could be anywhere in England.”

Granted, Dingle is far enough west that any gig outside of Kerry feels like a long trek, says Fred, although he remembers Deirdre O’Kane saying to him that no matter where you live you’ll have to travel somewhere.

Dingle is also a Gaeltacht area. Julie speaks fluent Irish and is an ambassador for Seachtain na Gaeilge. Fred too, is trying to broaden his cúpla focail. He took part in Realtí na Gaeilge in 2023.

“I think Fred will go down in history as the only man to leave one Gaeltacht and go to another to learn Irish,” Julie says. “Fred is super positive about the language. Do you remember the day after you came back? You said to me, could we speak Irish every day, just a little bit? And so we do.”

“When we’re trying to keep something from the boys, we’d be ag caint as Gaeilge,” says Fred.

“But I have to remind Fred that it’s not a secret language if they also understand it, cause our oldest boy Ted goes to a Gaeilscoil,” explains Julie.

I’ll say to Julie ‘an rachamid go dtí an linn snámh’, and Ted will turn up with his goggles on saying ‘ceart go leoir!’

Julie explains that Fred has thrown himself into an Gaeilge, and he’s not afraid to make mistakes. In that spirit, I ask Julie an ceapann sí go bhfuil eachtais mar Seachtain na Gaeilge fós tabhtach (are campaigns like Seachtain na Gaeilge still important)?

“An rud le Seachtain na Gaeilge ná, it’s saying to people tá Gaeilge againn. Ní chaithamid gach aon focal a rá as Gaeilge, just focal nó dhó a caithimh isteach go nádúrtha. Like, mar théann tú isteach sa siopa, abair go raibh maith agat in ionad thank you. Táimid ag iarraidh daoine a thabhairt linn to bain triail as an Gaeilge.” 

(The thing with Seachtain na Gaeilge is, it’s saying to people, you have Irish. You don’t need to say every word in Irish, just a word or two thrown into conversation naturally. Like if you go to a shop, say go raibh maith agat instead of thank you. We’re trying to bring people along with us and give Irish a go.”).

“Sin an áit ina tharlaionn comhra,” says Julie. “Bhí sé sásta triail a bhaint as.” (“That’s where conversations happen,” says Julie. “He was happy to give it a go.”)

Julie completed a few gigs as Gaeilge for Dublin Fringe last year, a social experiment that seemed to go well. “I

was testing the waters to an extent, but it was just wonderful. And I did another couple of shows after Christmas with it. And you know, people have been in touch about doing the show again, so you never know.”

With two touring comedians living in the house, surely a lot of personal, day to day stuff ends up being aired on stage, I say.

“We definitely do use our actual life. I think a lot of our biggest laughs Fred relates to our relationship. And I often joke saying I’m never going to divorce you because you are 90% of my material,” says Julie.

“The odd time it does happen that we will have conversations, and the conversations are funny. But there’s a bit of a disagreement as to who said the funny bit — who came up with the joke? And also, you know, somebody might set you up for the joke, and then you come in with the punchline, but actually it’s the other person who created the scenario. Yes, we need to start copywriting things..”

“I think if I see you on stage with the guitar or a piano, I’ll ask a few questions,” laughs Fred.

The couple have tried gigging together in a tour called Marriage Counselling, but it proved too difficult logistically.

“We were literally passing each other the baby backstage,” says Fred. They would love to do it again someday, but on stage together. Julie says their back-and-forth banter is when they’re at their best: 

Maybe when the kids are old enough they can drive us to the gigs?

While they find much of their material in their personal interactions, they hone their material at the Kerry Comedy Club in Tralee, Castle Gregory, and Dingle.

“What helps me is to have somewhere we can try stuff out in a safe space. We do it at least every month and a half, so it gives us a deadline. It’s a bit of a workshop but it’s also a safe space, because sometimes the stuff that I put out, I haven’t even checked it politically,” says Fred.

Even with all that honing and practising, bad gigs happen.

“A bad gig is utterly awful. I had a bad gig a couple of weeks ago in the sense that I probably wasn’t on form. It was one of those situations, it had been so long since I had a bad gig, I was probably a bit complacent,” Julie says.

“I went out, and it was just the stuff of nightmares.

“After that gig, the people who could really comfort and console me were comedians, and a couple of very successful comedians got in touch to say, ‘we’ve all had gigs like that’. So it’s a very kind of, what’s the word?”

“Sorry, I don’t know, I haven’t had that experience yet,” quips Fred.

“Yeah, yeah,” laughs Julie. “It’s such a difficult job, I think you do need the support of your peers. Fred’s been doing it so much longer than me that people really have such love for Fred. You have real established friendships and relationships through comedy.”

“Well, that’s the thing. I often think the irony of it is that people associate stand-up and comedy with loneliness and being on the road, but it’s given me a lot of the best friends that I have, and of course, it’s how Julie and I met.”

The natural easy banter between Julie and Fred is lovely, and it’s clear to see they adore each other. They are very much a team. They needed that support at the end of 2024 when Fred’s mom and then Julie’s dad died within a couple of weeks of each other.

When I ask Fred about his mom, Mary, it’s clear that his grief is very much just below the surface.

“It’s still so present,” says Julie. “It’s been really, really hard because we didn’t expect either death. And it was only this week that it hit home with me that, oh, my dad is dead. And I realised that nobody will love me the way my dad did, and it makes me so sad but also I realised how lucky I was to be loved like that, because not everyone is.”

At this stage, there’s not a dry eye in the house. Hearing about Fred and Julie’s grief is sobering. Fred talks about how popular his mom was and how much she loved people, and hated being in the spotlight, and Julie reminisces on what a wonderful life her dad lived — and one lived “very much on his own terms”.

“Johnny was buried on December 23, and mom died a couple of weeks before, and within all that we were signed up for gigs, and it was Christmas, and we have young kids so we had to give them a great Christmas,” explains Fred.

The grief is there, but life goes on. In the middle of his grief, Fred said he appeared on Brendan O’Connor’s radio show to promote his tour, and it all got on top of him.

“At one moment, I realised I just couldn’t continue. There was just so much sadness. And Brendan handled it very well, but he did look at me over my tears, and he goes, “if you want to see Fred Cooke on his tour you can visit fredcookecomedian.com’, and the camera is on me and I can’t stop crying,” remembers Fred, laughing.

Even in the face of grief Julie and Fred find humour, and in that humour some solace. “The reason it helps me is because that was a common language between myself and my dad. I find it really kind of healing. Everyone was so sad at his funeral but I wanted the eulogy to be funny, because that’s what he would have wanted.”

• Julie Jay and Fred Cooke are both on tour. For upcoming dates, see juliejaycomedy.com/upcoming-gigs and fredcookecomedian.com/tour-dates. Julie writes a column for the Irish Examiner’s Parenting section every Tuesday.