Name: James McCann! | Are You Garbage Comedy Podcast w/ Kevin Ryan & H. Foley
Uploaded: 2025-08-24T21:00:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'James McCann! | Are You Garbage Comedy Podcast w/ Kevin Ryan & H. Foley' from AreYouGarbage? Comedy Podcast on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'James McCann! | Are You Garbage Comedy Podcast w/ Kevin Ryan & H. Foley' from AreYouGarbage? Comedy Podcast on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-24. Transcript available.

James McCann! | Are You Garbage Comedy Podcast w/ Kevin Ryan & H. Foley

Calling all homies and bozos, you're cordially invited to come hang out with
the boys on that
Back on the Block tour. Grab the squad and come see us. It's going to be a good
time.
A little stand-up comedy, plus we play R.U. Garbage with the crowd.
Yeah, we're starting September. We're doing San Francisco, Portland, Seattle,
Brea, California, Burlington, Vermont, Boston, Massachusetts, Atlanta, Georgia,
Charlotte, North Carolina, Raleigh, North Carolina, Richmond, Virginia,
Baltimore, Maryland,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the Met, Rochester, New York, Toronto.
Get your tickets at RUGarbage.com. We love you.
Welcome to another exciting edition of R.U. Garbage,
the show where you find out if your favorite comedians are classy individuals
or absolute trash.
Now, here are your hosts, Kevin Ryan and H. Foley.
Hey, everybody out there, and welcome back to everybody's favorite podcast.
This is R.U. Garbage.
Oh, yeah.
It's that little show we sit down with your favorite comedians, and we find
that it's the group to be classy.
Yeah.
It's just a big old piece of trash.
Trash, trash, trash.
I'm your host, H. Foley, coming at you on a beautiful day.
We're out back here at Tootie's in a new edition.
She just got back from the pet store.
Okay.
Bought a bunch of ticks.
Okay, good for her.
So watch out.
I didn't know they sold those at the pet store.
You gave me a little more on that.
My cousin's coming at you from right next to me.
That's two hours down the drain.
He is the CEO of R.U. Garbage.
He is an international businessman and a tough critic.
I'll tell you that right now.
Give it up for KJ.
Guy's a hard laugh on a Monday.
Give it up for KJ.
Kevin James Ryan, everybody.
What up, gang?
Shout out to you.
Thanks for tuning in.
As always, please make sure you rate, view, subscribe on iTunes.
Full video available on YouTube.
Full video available over there on Spotify.
And the boys, I got to be honest with you, climbing the charts over there.
We're on the charts over there.
Look out.
Charts.
Sure, it's the bottom half of the charts, but we're on the charts.
Still.
And then, obviously, the greatest website of all time, www.patreon.com.
A lot of money, gang.
Yes, sir.
Gang, we couldn't be more excited to have our incredibly, and I mean incredibly,
special guest
here with us today for the first time.
He is a very funny, very successful stand-up comedian, podcaster, and author.
He just put out his fourth book of poems, Disquieting Levels of Egg.
Look at that.
He's got a brand new special out September 1st on his YouTube page, and you can
hear him
every week on his amazing podcast, James Donald Forbes McCann, Catamaran Plan.
Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for James Donald Forbes McCann.
The thunder from down under, as they call him.
This is the best podcast professionally that I've ever...
Usually, you're in a corner, and there's a guy smoking a joint, and there's
eight guys
doing mushrooms in minute quantities in the corner.
This is a top corner operation.
Hey, you leave LeMaire out of this.
He's a good kid.
He's only one guy.
We play for keeps, baby.
But this is also...
I mean, this is very garbage set.
Like, to have the good set.
The rich guy thing is to go, I don't care.
I'm a slob.
No, we care too much.
We care too much.
New money.
Upwardly mobile working class.
Whoa, upwardly mobile working class.
That's my audience.
That's my favorite group of people in the world.
Upwardly mobile.
Upwardly mobile working class.
No, you don't want downwardly mobile working class.
No.
That's the opioid people.
Sure.
Well, we don't discourage, you know.
I'll take those two.
A little tramp, a little fan.
Whatever you want to do.
I want people to have at least enough money to buy the tickets.
Listenings for free, though.
Don't forget that game.
Or have to sell them for sex later on.
Buddy, give us the backstory.
Give us the origin story of James Donald Forbes McCann.
All right.
Very prestigious name.
For a collar that frayed.
This is a good.
You pulled that out of a bag.
At some point, I thought that was fancy to do four names.
Very fancy.
You know, like Madonna, she goes the one name and prints one name.
They go, look how fancy.
You know, I'm so famous.
I just need one name.
You could say you're so weak that you only think you can get one name across to
people.
Of course.
If you have real star power, you should be able to get four names to fly.
Uh-huh.
And it also cuts out a lot of the weak fans.
You've got to really be committed to type in all four names.
A lot of characters.
On the street, you go by James McCann.
Yeah, James is.
Literary.
James Donald Forbes.
Man, that's the number one best-selling book of poems.
And here's the secret to having a number one best-selling book of poems.
Yeah.
Just release it.
Sure.
Because if you, man, there are so few sales for books of poems that to win the
poem category
on Amazon, you sell three books in a day.
You're a number one best-selling poet.
It's killing it.
I like it.
I'm not making enough money out of it, but I feel very successful.
I love it.
What's my story?
I'm from Australia.
I'm from Adelaide.
Would you say, if you can believe it?
I thought Detroit.
Brooklyn.
It is like Pittsburgh, and it's like a post-industrial town that's trying to
recast itself as an arts
hub.
Say the name of it again.
Adelaide.
Sweet Adelaide.
Sweet Adelaide.
Man, we're in trouble this week.
The best football player going into finals has just dropped, I don't know what
words
I'm like, a strong F anti-homosexual slur, and he might be out for the full
final season.
Damn.
And we're trying to finagle something to let him back in.
To get him back in.
It's hard.
Where did he drop this slur?
On field.
Yikes.
Yeah.
The other team reported him, which seems to me a breach of some sort of code.
Sure.
I can see that.
Obviously, you shouldn't be doing it.
Right.
Isaac, but what a great player.
We'd really like him to play.
Now, when you say football, what are we talking about?
Rugby?
Aussie rules football.
This looks like Gaelic football.
Aussie Osborne.
Yes.
He has died so that the game may live.
It's a lot of...
Man, I did a road trip through New Mexico.
Anyway, I went to California, but Pistachio Land was on the way.
It was like a theme park to the pistachio.
But their big thing on their website, and they hadn't taken it down, was that
Aussie Osborne
had once visited Pistachio Land.
That's big.
That's all right.
I got a big photo.
Now it's number one seller, James Ford McCann.
James Donald Forbes McCann.
We've got the new special ad now, Black Israelite.
We've got the new book of poems.
Wait, is that the name of the special, Black Israelite?
Yeah.
I love it.
It's all about Israel and black American people.
So we'll see if that's allowed up on the YouTube.
You are a niche kind of guy.
It's a loose cannon.
I like it.
It's hard to search.
It's a big problem.
I'm trying to fix that.
I've got to get one of these people.
The number one stand-up comedy special about back Israelites by an Australian
guy.
It's mostly about Sammy Davis Jr.
No, I was...
Yeah, Adelaide.
I went to my...
You get the whole family background.
You went the whole thing, baby.
All right.
Mom's, dad's, brother's, sister's.
All right, dad's side, it's odd.
They lived in a very rough part of town, and they refused to move because my
dad's dad
was scared that he would have a heart attack.
He had friends who'd moved off the neighborhood street, and they'd all died.
And so he said, I'm staying here.
So even though he worked his way up to be like...
He was a deputy head of telecom.
It was like AT&T in the state.
Your grandfather.
Yes.
And so he would have a...
He was afraid to move.
He was afraid to move.
And so like a limousine would pick him up from a very rough part of town every
day.
Anyway.
That's awesome.
It was very...
I like that kind of superstition.
But it was in the 70s, so working for like a power company or a phone company
did not have...
Now you'd be on huge, you know, CFO, weird money.
But at the time, you were a civil servant.
Gotcha.
You know, they gave you a fancy car, but you didn't have heaps of cash.
But he, you know, he went to a...
That was a civil servant job back then?
Yes.
The government owned the telecommunication.
Damn.
I didn't know Australia was like that.
We, if only we could return to it and gets...
Now we're getting ripped up now.
The bloody Chinese owned the phone companies.
And they're not doing a great job, let me tell you that.
Yeah, they got Chinese phone companies down there?
My mum came from...
What the hell's going on?
Oh, it's a lot.
My mum came from the worst place in Adelaide, which was Elizabeth.
And my grandparents kept living there and we would go up there.
It was a saddle...
It was a...
Suburbs are usually bad.
The further out you go in Australia, the worse it is.
We didn't have white flight.
We didn't have some of the dynamics happening in the 1970s in America.
So fancy people live close.
And the further out you go, the poorer it gets.
But they were both...
They're like the first people in their schools to...
Sorry, in their families to go to like uni and no...
They went to public schools, like bruff and tumble public schools.
Okay.
How'd your mom and dad meet?
They were teachers.
They both became English teachers.
No kidding.
And they went out to...
I think it was Wayala, which is...
Oh, man.
That's a...
What the fuck?
That's a rough...
We don't...
It's like someone just turned them on.
No, it was like an iron...
It was an iron town that shut down.
A steel town.
And you go back there now.
People say, Wayala, why bother?
And then the next town is Port Augusta, Port Agata.
It's called the Iron Triangle.
The third town is riddled with cancer.
And it's genuinely...
And Chinese phone companies.
Oh, they yearned to have a Chinese phone company move in there and just give
some semblance
that something's going on.
But they...
Like, it was really important.
They were rapidly mobile people.
They went to university.
Right.
They got to become English teachers.
Were they English teachers in Adelaide?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Although dad wanted to be a lawyer and he got to go...
He was a communist in college, in university.
Really?
And then he went to China just after the Cultural Revolution.
You're joking.
No.
Your father was a communist.
My father was a communist.
He was studying history.
He went to China as all the sort of mass death was starting to wind down.
But he really...
The West didn't know what was happening in China.
Is this after the...
What was the call when the guy ran over in the tank?
Before.
Before.
So this was the Great Leap Forward where Mao decides we're going to have...
People are going to smelt iron in their backyards.
And then what do you know?
It's not good iron.
And you can't really sell it.
And then there's a lot of famine.
Because Albania is giving them all their food.
It's a beautiful part of history.
Your dad was a communist.
That's crazy.
But then...
That's some commie bullshit.
Came back from China very much not a communist.
And is now...
But in months...
Very conservative.
So he gets...
But a hankering for mooshu pork.
Beautiful culture.
He gets into...
Of course.
He gets intrigued by communism in his studies, in his readings.
He wanted to be a revolutionary.
He wanted to...
Let me ask you this.
You mentioned that the...
Take over Australia, I think.
You mentioned that your grandfather was owning it or working for a telecommunications
company
was a civil servant job.
Yes.
Australia was never borderline communist, socialist, were they?
Man...
Don't sound democratic, if you ask me.
God damn, they own a phone company.
His dad's going to China.
What the fuck?
Don't sound like BlackRock, I'll tell you that.
How many of your uncles ever went to China?
We had a...
I got two words for you.
Vanguard.
Let's go.
We had a go becoming a little independent from US power in the 70s.
I'm out.
And then spontaneously, a prime minister was not the prime minister anymore,
and we've been
f