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When Joe Pasquale was seven years old, his mother, Ethel, was involved in a serious car accident. Not wearing a seatbelt, she was thrown through the windscreen of the car, suffered concussion and subsequently developed epilepsy and depression. “She also lost a baby, a friend killed herself and it all happened in a short space of time,” Pasquale says. Young Joe decided that it was his job to make her laugh every day until the end of her life. “Jimmy Carr always says, ‘Show me a comic and I’ll show you someone they tried to make laugh as a kid’. And that was it for me. And then I never grew up.”
The boy who never grew up is now almost 65, but his childlike nature (“Childlike, not childish – that’s important”) has never left him. Watch him on stage now and you’ll see an act that hasn’t changed in spirit since he came second on ITV talent show New Faces in 1987. That famous voice still squeaks, the props are still homemade, the pratfalls still come thick and fast, and the one-liners are still ingenious and groan-inducing.
Ethel died in 1999, but Pasquale still sees it as his duty to cheer people up, to give them “freedom from concern” for an hour. Hence the relentless gigging (he racks up 30,000 to 40,000 miles a year in his car) and the annual pantomime. Pasquale has done one a year since the late 1980s – this time it’s Cinderella in Dartford.
Before that, Pasquale, who was given an unexpected mid-career bump when he won ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2004, is heading to the Edinburgh Fringe to try something a little different. He is starring in 11½ Angry Men, a comic spoof of the 2003 Fringe play for which Guy Masterson assembled a dozen stand-ups, including Bill Bailey, and directed them in an acclaimed adaptation of the Sidney Lumet film.
“I knew a lot of the cast,” says Pasquale. “Terry Alderton I’ve known for 40 years, Phil Nichol for 30. So when I saw the line-up, I thought: “I can’t not do this”. And don’t ask about money, because there’s no money in it. The opportunity to do this with 11 other comics was too good to miss.” Director Owen O’Neill’s script follows Reginald Rose’s original stage play, with a jury deliberating over the guilt of a teenager accused of murder, with one key detail changed. “Somebody was murdered with a sausage,” says Pasquale with glee.
From his low-status oddball stage persona to having his nipple pierced and pubic hair waxed live on television (on the 2017 ITV flop The Nightly Show), Pasquale has never worried about being cool. In fact, he nearly died for his art when he slipped on stage in Skegness and impaled his leg on a pair of moose antlers, resulting in seven stitches and an impressive scar. The antlers were for a brief joke about Pasquale having “too much moose” in his hair.
Pasquale has no ego, which he puts down to his life before comedy. He did “10 years of normal jobs” before a colleague cajoled him into applying for New Faces aged 26. Previously, he’d trudged through a series of jobs, from working at the margarine factory in Purfleet with his dad to being a porter at Smithfield meat market. “I had something inside of me that had to come out,” he says. “I was that bloke at work who’d never shut up, a pain in the a--- who was always trying to make people laugh. And then I found an outlet for it.” The lightbulb moment came when he worked as a Greencoat at the Warner Holiday Camp in Lowestoft, where he called bingo, refereed wrestling matches and, sometimes, tried a little comedy.
Through his early variety work, he was mentored by some very big comedy names – Ken Dodd, Bob Monkhouse and Des O’Connor. “All three of them were amazing; they helped so many young comics,” he says. “They were the best in the world at the time, they were the gods of comedy. To spend time with them was a gift. They took me under their wing and I stayed friends with them all till the very end.” Does Pasquale feel as if he is now carrying the flame for their era of comedy? “I think we all are,” he says, referencing The Prat Pack, an old-school comedy foursome he has developed with his great pals and fellow variety survivors Bradley Walsh, Brian Conley and Shane Richie. “There are 400 channels on telly now, but no one caters for our age group, the 60-plus, with that sort of comedy.”
He will reunite with The Prat Pack after Edinburgh to plan the new tour. “Brad has a big piece of paper where he’ll write down the songs. We do that for five minutes. And then for the next three hours we talk about our prostates.
“We have bets – who’s going to go first? We’re in Sniper Alley now, waiting for someone to pick us off.”
I meet Pasquale in a pub in Rochester, Kent, not far from where he used to live, before he relocated to rural Norfolk, where he lives alone. He’s in good shape for a 64-year-old, lean and looking younger than his years. This is in part due to the obsessive lockdown-running habit he developed (five to 10 miles a day, which has wrecked his feet) and partly due to getting in shape for 2020’s The Real Full Monty, an ITV show where celebrities bare all for charity. While he is friendly and voluble, he is not quite an open book. He won’t, for example, talk too much about his son, the actor and comedian Joe Tracini.
Tracini is the youngest of Pasquale’s five children from two marriages, and his only son. Christened Joe Pasquale, a name he shared with his father and grandfather, Tracini changed his name when he began forging his own showbusiness career. Pasquale Jr followed doggedly in his father’s footsteps from a very young age, winning magic shows and seeming set for a glittering career on stage, but went public with his mental health and addiction struggles in his 2022 memoir Ten Things I Hate About Me, and then again in 2024 with the Channel 4 documentary Me and the Voice in My Head. In both, he detailed his alcohol and drug problems during his adolescence, his borderline personality disorder and his suicidal thoughts. His childhood, he said in the documentary, was “one long argument”.
Pasquale does not want to discuss Tracini without him there and says his son has the same policy towards his famous father. “All I’ll say is we went through some terrible times, but through that we found an honest place and our relationship is better than ever. But I won’t talk about the personal stuff without him here. We don’t lie to each other, we tell each other our problems. It’s great. I didn’t have that with my dad.”
If Pasquale has had the odd professional blow (ITV’s The Joe Pasquale Show never got a full series, for example), it hasn’t left any residual sense of disappointment. Fame, it seems, is not all it’s cracked up to be. A case in point is I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. Pasquale politely attended a two-hour meeting with two junior researchers, but left after a few minutes. “I’m not interesting, you don’t want me,” he told them. Fast-forward a few months and Pasquale was crowned King of the Jungle, beating former royal butler Paul Burrell in the final. “Then it went mad,” says Pasquale. “Who thought I’d ever be on Parkinson? And then it all calmed down, which was great. I don’t like all that high-profile stuff. It’s not for me.”
It’s easy to take Pasquale at his word. He seems unfussed, unflashy, happiest when discussing the minutiae of stand-up comedy or encounters with comic greats. He tells one story about the death of Bob Monkhouse, too long to recount here, that is extraordinary. It involves a pick-and-mix receipt, the Reader’s Digest, aliens, and ends with the sentence: “I didn’t even know there was a song called Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy.” Only once in our conversation does Pasquale put his guard up: when I mention the stand-up Stewart Lee.
The comedian has twice accused Pasquale of plagiarism: once in a Sunday Times article after Pasquale played at the 1995 Royal Variety Performance, and again in 2006, during Lee’s 90s Comedian tour. In the article, Lee suggested that Pasquale liberally borrows material from alternative acts, with particular reference to a one-liner from Irish comic Michael Redmond. The 2006 stand-up set is some of Lee’s most acidic material aimed at another comedian. “I’m not even going to discuss that one,” says Pasquale. “We’ll leave that, because that’s just meeting trouble halfway.”
The irony is that Lee’s piece was full of praise for Pasquale, highlighting his “delightful and engaging brand of Tommy Cooper-esque silliness that stretches way back to the last days of the music-hall tradition”. Indeed, in recent years, there has been a subtle reappraisal of Pasquale’s career, led by the likes of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton.
“Have I been reappraised?” says Pasquale, with a little scepticism. “No. No, no. I am genuinely grateful that I’ve lasted this long and I’ve loved doing it. I don’t care about the perception of me. Am I trying to get reappraised? Get rediscovered? No, I couldn’t give a shit. I just want to make people laugh.”
11½ Angry Men is at Pleasance @ EICC, Edinburgh, Aug 5-22. Tickets: pleasance.co.uk
The Prat Pack are on tour in September
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