Actually, that one was my idea.

Byrne is just back from the Hay-on-Wye Festival, and is giddy about how much he enjoyed it, doing impressions of the literary folk who inhabit it, saying how they've asked him to live there, asked him to write children's books (his main idea involves an incontinent pirate), the surreal nature of hanging out with Gordon Brown and "the guy who wrote Schindler's List", bookworms, and "incredibly famous people that no one knows". As we walk back to a hotel, Byrne points out a giant black Honda that he's just bought. It's illegally parked (he says that this particular hotel is a great spot for parking your car for free while you're on holidays) and is a bit worried about its position "if you f**king just touch black cars, they scrape".

He just sold his jeep for "a bag of cash to some guy in Galway", and slips into surreal mode, doing an impression of his jeep phoning him, crying at the prospect of having to pull horses for the rest of its life.

Byrne doesn't care about his new car, but he cares about the one he has just sold, one of several examples, he claims about how he "lives in the past".

He's been in comedy eleven years. It began when he MCed a local charity night for two girls who were going over to Romania to work in an orphanage. "Do you remember the Romanian babies, do you remember that thing? Well I was hosting it.

I was so bad, vulgar and everything." It didn't put him off though, and one night he asked Barry Murphy for a gig in the Castle Inn in Christchurch. He kept gigging, generating agent interest and finally secured one, who also worked with Ardal O'Hanlon and Simon Pegg. He became a household name in England following a Channel 4 documentary which followed three comics in the run up to the Edinburgh festival.

His subsequent gigs sold out. "It started off with a hundred seater, and now I play an eight hundred seater, " he says, rather proudly.

His television "stuff", Anonymous and now Class Clowns, are a footnote to his stand up. He slips into impressions of people apologising to him after gigs, in particular one man "who was nearly crying", he giggles, and after a gig told him how shocked he was that he was any good, "because I only seen you on the telly. I was telling everyone you were shit." That always happens. The majority of people who go to his gigs "are converted". Anonymous has been a huge success for RTE. He thinks it's good, "but it could be fantastic if they did everything I told them. But they're just afraid."

Kathryn Thomas dressed up as an old man and Ken Doherty as a priest have been his favourites so far.

You know that Byrne has made it, because now he's a cartoon. Eyebrowy, a satirical website that previously concentrated on the incestuous Dublin music scene, broadened their repertoire to Irish comics last year, releasing a DVD lampooning Des Bishop, Dara O'Briain, Dave McSavage, PJ Gallagher and Jason Byrne. Byrne's cartoon was a hyperactive and high-pitched character, building a second series of Anonymous with the catchphrase 'dey don know'. He saw it first at Electric Picnic, thinking that when everybody said Eyebrowy was playing, it was a band he hadn't heard of. "F**k me, I was standing beside David McSavage, and yer man with my voice is just so f**kin' high-pitched and squeaky, my God, no wonder my wife is constantly annoyed at me.

But I loved it. To be made into a cartoon, is f**kin', I tell ye, I was very proud."

Irish comedy is going through a sort of strange renaissance, with everyone very much striking out on their own, and RTE commissioning more series than ever (Naked Camera, Joy In The Hood, Anonymous, The Modest Adventures of David O'Doherty, Class Clowns). Byrne puts the fact that this is all driven by independent individuals and the lack of time and funding for comedians to work together.

"If we get a group of comics together and spend a few weeks on something it's just not good unless you're getting some sort of financial backing. It means we have to turn down all these big gigs we get paid for. So we all kind of have to work on our own. . . some people just can't work with other people. Like Des [Bishop], I don't think Des could ever work with anybody else. He's just so driven on his own, it's always his own project and he likes to be in control of that himself. And I suppose Naked Camerawas Maeve and Patrick, but they were all doing their own thing. Comics do like to be on their own a lot. They don't like working with other people. They tend to shut down."

The latest project, Class Clowns, shows comedians returning to their schools to gig for classmates and teachers. Byrne loved it. "I'm Mr Nostalgia, " he says, settling on a bench in cords, runners and a denim shirt, with famous person sunglasses, "because I'm a Piscean." He says all he ever does is go "remember this, remember that". Even if he was sitting in a vault full of gold, he says, all he could think of would be "remember ten years ago we were on a wall eating an apple". He loved school, Ballinteer Community School. When he returned, everything was the same, which he remembered thanks to his "amazing visual memory".

In the engineering room, he found the metronome he made for honours engineering in the Leaving Certificate which the teacher had kept so he could show students what not to do. "You were supposed to make the circuit board. But I bought it and all the insides in Pete's Electronics in town. I was going to make a 1940s replica radio with an oval top. But I'm shit at making anything, so I ended up making a triangle wooden box which looked like a bird house. So I put the f**kin' electrics inside it with sticky pads and the minute you turned it on it just went, duuuuurrrrrrrr. And I had an on/off LED switch. It's brilliant. Well, it's horrendous."

College was never mentioned to most people in his school. Afterwards he went to Dundrum College of Commerce "a tech thing", but was asked to leave after a year because he was "disrupting the college". He and his mates used to wait at the gate every morning and divert the students going in towards the pub. He became an apprentice bar man, and then went into lighting. It was in a lighting warehouse when he was 19 where he met PJ Gallagher who was 16. Byrne and the staff spent most of their time tying PJ up and throwing him in skips, until one day he turned around and threatened to "bate yiz", so they stopped.

He laughs about such encounters and adventures with PJ and other comics and friends that include the Little Britain duo and Simon Pegg, and basically any household name. At 35, he doesn't look it, "that's because I dress like a fucking child still". His wife has slowed down his workload, as has his six-year-old son and a new born. His main worry these days isn't "having a laugh" (he turned down a tour around the Scottish Highlands that was pitched to him with venom, "yeah, like that's what I need in my life right now, a bit of a laugh. I'll ring the wife and tell her 'put the bills on hold, this tour isn't much money but it's a bit of a laugh'") but "bloody" banks, where he's off to right after the interview, and bills. And with that, and a final cigarette he's off to his new car, which luckily, no one has scraped yet.