Oh, I

know.

But I love it.

See, the thing is, I've always loved Australia and would have lived here if it wasn't so far away from my other life.

Well, that's fair.

And I had a career, so I couldn't just give all that up to be in Australia.

But let's just say, for example, if Nova had said, hey, would you like to do two years on the radio? I would have absolutely jumped at it because I loved, particularly when I was younger, like honestly, between the knee and the hip and everything.

It didn't work.

I mean, you must be glad to be back because I'm looking at your

tour schedule.

I mean, you've always...

No, but honestly, these sales took us all by surprise.

And I think a lot of comics, they probably wouldn't say that.

They would like to pretend like they expected it, but...

Honestly, you know, you just never know.

It didn't work.

But I just think more.

But I'll tell you what was fun for me about it was – Because my career, my entertainment career, was very much about pitching ideas to Irish TV shows, and they were very involved, and they were documentaries, and they were fun, but it was always very involved and a lot of time.

I actually quite like, even though social media, so much about social media that I hate, but what I like is it actually made me think about stand-up in shorter bits, And also think about things more universally because they're just going out to anybody.

Like from Nepal to like Argentina, people may see these bits.

So actually I found all that pretty like liberating.

Challenging, but liberating in a way that like I wouldn't have expected.

But it really only kicked in...

Oh, desktop computers,

Yeah, I put a lot

of thought into the name.

Very literal.

Actually, I guess I didn't have a name for the show at the time.

We're excited.

What can we expect as audience? So I go after social media and how it's kind of destroyed society a little bit in this show.

And I've actually been a big fan of the fact that Australia brought in, like, a social media ban for kids.

All the girls have to pick, right? And the results are in.

And when you're 19, your buddies are not really, especially when you're still living in Ireland at the time, right?

Yeah, well, I was, you know, I was still back and forth.

Like, I was still in college then.

My first year of college was like a washout in terms of my behavior, drugs and alcohol.

Okay.

What was your drug of choice? Well, you know, it was in Cork City in 1995.

You weren't getting a lot of different drugs, so I was taking a lot of rave drugs.

Oh, that's crazy.

Do you have, like, a period that you identify with the most?

You know, honestly, I identified with all the great and all the terrible periods, but I guess because, you know, in 2006, like, at that stage I was a proper adult with, like, money.

So when they got into the playoffs in 2006, I actually flew back from Ireland to go to the playoffs, and actually three of us that are here right now We're at that first game, which was actually this, it was the first game was a rain out.

So we were at this, the first game, which was actually the second game when we won that game, won nothing.

It was like a brutal game.

And I really thought that was it, you know, that was the time.

So all the other periods I love in 88, like 86, I was 10 and I remember it well, but like, I can't remember the specific moments as much, but 88, I remember it all.

Perhaps it's just because this is New York, but have you ever thought about if there's anything about the essence of the Mets that connects with the comedian sensibility?

which is

the diplomatic way of saying it.

Yeah.

At times.

And, you know, I actually get some pushback from people who are like, how can you even talk to these people? But at my age, you know, I just...

Listen, I've looked north to a divided society.

And if you stay in your camps, you know, and you just choose not to talk, you really get nowhere.

you know?

Softened up how? Just,

you know, my mother and I, it was still very much like, come on, let's...

I get it, yeah, yeah.

You know, I don't know how to describe it as a, like...

We were there, myself and my two brothers were there for her the entire time.

But it was functional at times.

And at times it was like, not a harshness because that's not, it wasn't harsh, but it was like an energy of like, let's go.

But at the same time, it's like, I think it's all that together that is part of whatever the heck we're working through.

But I had

read that book and Barbara Ehrenreich, American journalist, had gone undercover in the United States working minimum wage jobs to see, you know, was it a livable wage? But she was undercover and she was able to really give a good expose on the difficulties of affordability at that time in America, particularly around health care.

And, you know, there was big these were big corporate employers and, you know, employing people that were really struggling to get by.

So I said I had read it and she said she wanted to do a TV version of that.

But however, we would have to get permission to film.

It wouldn't be undercover.

So I was like, yeah, let's do it.

No, I found,

It was very Irish

though.

Most of what I had done up until the China Project was very Irish focused.

It sounds like a government program.

That sounds heebie-jeebies.

The TV station that I was working for in Ireland was the public broadcaster.

But it was the main channel.

It hurt?

You did it the way that's-

Yeah, I, I, I, we were distinctly nonpolitical on the show.

Well, I don't hide the fact that I can't stand the Chinese government and I, like, all, for a lot of my life have, like, hated the way that they treat some of the minority groups, Tibet and Xinjiang.

Like, all these things, like, I detest.

But at the same time, the series itself I really wanted to focus on the Chinese people because everything about China focuses on those other things.

Hmm.

So I think sometimes when they speak English, they speak with a simple grammar that people can misconstrue as, like, abruptness.

But also, uh, in general, I don't know, like I just think the thing I learned from th- these few things that I've done is like we, everybody has way more in common than they think.

But what was frustrating to you? It

wasn't frustrating for me because I left.

Yeah.

Because what happened was I was in the middle of a tour.

I was touring the show about my mother, me and mom, a show about my dead mom.

And it was like basically a comedy show about grief.

And the pandemic started kicking, you know, like the rumbling started.

that

Mm-hmm.

So that was, like, five or six weeks.

But, like, we just kept thinking it was gonna get kick back in, but then Delta said that they were not gonna run direct flights from Dublin anymore, and by that stage I had got, I was quite established at The Cellar by that stage, and I felt personally that, like, I wanted to spend at least four months of every year in New York.

Like, I was already starting to, like, develop some stuff in the States while also keeping my Irish career going.

And we've always had this summer house out in West Hampton since I was 14 years old, and I just liked spending my summers in West Hampton.

That, since I came back from China, that's what I did.

So I panicked, and I was like, "I gotta get the fuck out of here because I don't want to get stuck here and not be able to go back for the summer."

Yeah, yeah.

That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code Steph.

So when I first started doing comedy I always wore hoodies, and then I got superstitious because, like, I murdered in this one hoodie, so then I, like, I had to gig in that hoodie particularly for a while.

It'd be bizarre if you weren't

... then they said, "Go out, go outside and wait, uh, to do a chest X-ray." And I can't remember if it was before the chest X-ray or after, but while I was sitting on the bench waiting, this woman, weird, I don't know why she knew to ask, she was like, random woman on the bench was like, "Is every, is everything okay?" And I said, "No." And I, like, I, I, I was, I was getting, like, emotional.

I was like, "I just found out I can-" And I have no idea who that woman was, but, like, she was the only person.

[laughs]

You didn't, you didn't mention that part

...

I, I have a very complicated story.

[upbeat music] It's very hard to get it through on a lighthearted show like this.

But, uh, anyway, uh, no, I had a very, like, I had an Irish comedy career, like a lot of TV shows and different things, and then I pitched a TV show where, and I had done these type of, like, immersion documentary shows.

So I pitched a TV show where I moved to China, and I had one year to learn enough Mandarin to do stand-up comedy in Mandarin in China for a Chinese audience.

And it was a six-part series about China through the, through the lens-

So do you still do, uh, standup in China?

Right.

But here's the thing, though.

I'm like you.

I don't, I don't wanna listen to a hang, whatever about being on one.

When I go to podcasts, y- you know, I don't wanna listen to a hang.

But w- here's the problem.

I'm wrong because all these bloody hangs are so insanely popular, and I don't get it.

Yeah

That's you being, well, that, that's you being, living in Ireland, you know? Like...

Bro, like, anytime I use an expression, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, like any of that, she's like, "What?" Uh, no, there's, there, there's been, there's been, I, I can't even, off the top of my head, I mean, it's a good area of comedy, but off the top of my head, I can't think of like, there's just been, there's been too many.

I, we have a 15-year age gap, you know? There's just been so many times.

Like, even, I wanted to call my special Prodigal American.

Would you rather the amount of internet we have today or no internet at all?

You wanna know the truth? And this is just with the benefit of hindsight.

No internet at all.

I think it was better for humanity.

Mm-hmm.

By then, you know, China had become quite a bit more international, so there wasn't the same level of excitement.

However, there was still a lot of admiration for the laowai, the foreigners that could speak Mandarin.

But what, the mistake that I made, which I've realized now, is that I didn't realize that in the Western world, some creators were gonna get humongous followings by shocking Chinese people in the States with, like, their good Chinese.

Like, shout-out to Xiaoma NYC, who's, like, humongous on the internet.

And in fairness, what he does is great, but I never th- I never thought about doing it, like, over here, other than my friends get such a kick out of it when I order in Chinese at a Chinese restaurant, and the Chinese are like, "Oh my God, your Chinese is so good." Like-

Like, sometimes people will say a book has been banned, but a book is not banned if you can't get it in a certain store or library, for example.

100%, right? So we still had free speech, we just, we were, you know, some people were being censored in certain spaces.

You're doing a Spanish as well to do comedy in Spanish.

Well, For those two projects, I had a network waiting for my thing.

The Spanish thing is a bit more of a maybe.

I am learning Spanish, but I haven't been doing it in the same way.

I'm not recording my progress from the get-go, but I just want to do that.

But I haven't been able to just put a year of my life aside like I did the other two times.

But the good thing about Spanish is The material that I can write about my journey of learning Spanish will actually be relevant to a lot of people in the United States because a lot of people learn Spanish in school.

Let's talk about that name.

[laughs]

I was getting way too much money for f- for a teenager.

But the, my, my, the funniest job that I had, which is actually the last job that I ever did that, like, wasn't 100% related to my comedy career.

Uh, in Ireland there was this frozen pizza called Goodfella's Pizza, very popular pizza, and they had a new type out, crispy crust, thin crust.

So they wanted to do this big promotion all throughout Ireland's, um, supermarkets b- which basically just to get people to taste it.

But they, they, uh, they got comedians and actors because they wanted you to put on, like, a New York accent, which I didn't have to do, being like, "Hey, kid, get over here.

Try a slice." So-

Do you have one of those?

You

know, for me, it's not frustrating, because honestly, particularly in the earlier part of my Irish career, when I kind of blew up originally, a lot of my comedy was fish out of water, kid from Queens, living in Ireland, here's what I see.

And those outsider points of view resonated with Irish people like in a really, really deep way.

And then, like I did the Aspen Comedy Festival 2005 here in the States.

Right.

And I went from being a superstar in Ireland to suddenly realizing these people have no connection to most of my jokes.

Like all my killer bits.

I assume this stuff is available somewhere, correct?

And then is the other one, is the language Irish? I never quite know.

Well, yeah, in English it's called Irish, and then in the Irish language it's called Gaelic.

A lot of people say Gaelic, which is not really incorrect.

Some people try to say that's incorrect, but that's really also fine.

It depends really what region you're from, Scotland, Ireland.

Anyway, either way, it's a very separate language, and I did, for the Mandarin and for the Irish language, I did TV shows where I had a year to learn those languages, do stand-up in those languages.

I did learn them because I was getting paid to learn them.

How quickly do you think, particularly if we're getting paid to do it, as was the case for you, how quickly can you become fluent in a language?