Ian Cognito: Much-loved standup comedian who was more likely to throw a TV out of a window than appear on it

Nothing in Ian Cognito’s life became him like the leaving of it. A jobbing comic for 30 years, mainstream success always eluded him, but by dying onstage – literally, not just metaphorically – he joined an exclusive club of entertainers (such as Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper, and Sid James) who all had heart attacks while performing, and died with their comedic boots on.

When Ian Cognito sat down suddenly, during his standup set at the Lone Wolf comedy club in Bicester, and slumped back in his chair in silence, everyone in the audience assumed it was just a joke. “Imagine if I died in front of you lot here,” he’d said, a few minutes earlier. “Imagine having a stroke, and waking up speaking Welsh.”

For several minutes people carried on laughing, until the compere, Andrew Bird, approached him to see if he was OK. “I was thinking, ‘He’s having such a good gig,’” said Bird. “Even when I walked onstage and touched his arm, I was expecting him to say, ‘Boo!’”

Ian Cognito was born Paul Barbieri in Barnet, northwest London, in 1958, to an Italian father, Aldo Barbieri, a fish and chip shop owner, and an Irish mother, Lillian (nee Sadd), a bookkeeper. Raised in Walthamstow in the northeast of the capital, he did some labouring on building sites and worked for British Airways before reading economics at the University of Bath.

He started gigging in the 1980s, and won a Time Out award in 1999, but despite establishing a reputation as a dynamic, provocative club comic, he never achieved the wider recognition his abrasive talent deserved. If you ever saw him live, it was easy to see why. Of course his stage name hardly helped but his main enemy was TV.

It’s impossible for comedians to fill big theatres without TV airtime, and Cognito’s uncompromising act was utterly incompatible with the one-eyed god. Shrewder comics learn to temper their material in exchange for small-screen exposure but Cognito was incapable of compromise. No subject was off limits. No taboo remained unbroken. Danger was written through him like a stick of rock.

Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of opinion. “Spare a thought for homeless people in winter,” he quipped. “It’s easy to trip over them when they’re covered in snow.” For me, that was a great gag, but I can see why a lot of people might not think so. When he was cracking jokes about racists and rapists, it all felt rather queasy. But when he was mocking the headline acts at Glastonbury, or riffing about teetotal comics who do TV ads for breweries, he was as brave and eloquent as one of Shakespeare’s fools.

Even the club circuit often found him too hot to handle. He liked to boast that he’d been banned from more clubs than any comic in the country. In true rock and roll style, he once threw a TV set out of his hotel room window. The CV on his website cited genital exposure. He set about the stage with power tools.

“I’m constantly in trouble,” he once said, with characteristic candour. “Booze is my problem. I just can’t seem to get the better of it. I’ve done some stupid things, and I’m not proud of that fact. The telly out of the window incident happened because room service was late. That’s drink for you. I’ve made some terrible mistakes.”

Fragments of his act survive on YouTube, but to know what made him special you had to see him in a small club, interacting with a live audience. He could die on his arse, he could rip the roof off – but you could always count on him to speak his mind.

Cognito, who was 60, is survived by two sons, Ollie and Billy, from his relationship with the performer Sarah Woollett.

The best gig I ever saw him do was at the Tunnel Club – a bear pit of a venue, in front of a raucous weekend crowd. “Me star, you punter,” he told one tipsy chatterbox. “Don’t go to a comedy gig and talk. It’s like going to a brothel and having a wank.”

“This is probably the worst job in the world for someone like me,” he told me during the interval, over a pint of Guinness. “It actually causes me a lot of problems, this bloody game. I can’t give up the booze. It’s not going to f***ing happen. God knows, I’ve tried.” He confessed he wasn’t built for a conventional commercial career. “I’m self-destructive,” he admitted. “I’m angry in real life.”

When he died, famous comics queued up to praise him – finally granting him the headline status that had always escaped his grasp. “I’ll never forget his kindness when I started out,” tweeted Jimmy Carr. Independent columnist Shappi Khorsandi remembered his beautiful blue eyes. But the last word should go to the man himself, winding up that gig at the Tunnel Club, all those years ago. “If anybody’s been offended by what they’ve heard up here, grow up. They’re only jokes.”

Ian Cognito (Paul John Barbieri), born 21 November 1958, died 11 April 2019