Des Bishop’s Irish Comedy with a New York Accent

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Photo via Des Bishop - desbishop.net

Des Bishop

Des Bishop

Des Bishop has faced numerous challenges: living on minimum wage, his father’s cancer diagnosis, and learning second and third languages among them. 

His current hurdle to overcome, however is retooling his humor for audiences in the country where he was born. 

“I think, for me, what's very challenging now is that that this is the first time in my life I’ve committed to just performing in the United States,” reveals the Queens-born comic who spent much of his life in Ireland since he was 14. “It’s fun to just figure lot what I’m saying to an American audience, what am I saying to these people and what do I have to offer. What do they care about? That, I have to say, has been quite the challenge for me.” 

Bishop, currently residing on the U.S. East Coast again, rises to the challenge of making a room full of Americans laugh on Wednesday, Sept. 25 for a show in the Mani Room of The Improv for a 7 p.m. show. 

On Being Irish

As for his success as a comedian in the land of his forebears, Bishop muses, “My Irishness as an Irishman that’s lived in Ireland two thirds of my life, that’s something I’ve explored deeply, as well as being a sort of outsider in Ireland. That’s quite unique to me. I think that’s one of the benefits of my Irish comedy career, that I had this outsider identity. The bad news about that is that most of that comedy is useless in the United States.

“The flipside to that, which has been very fun to explore recently is to Americans I’m just largely a New Yorker. I still have a strong New York accent. You’re hearing this Queens accent pummeling at you, and there are aspects of my New York identity which have been fun to explore. And it’s fun to just be that. That’s who I am. And not that that doesn’t resonate with Irish people, but my identity in Ireland resonates like, ‘Oh, that’s like the thing we see on TV.’ I don’t know; it doesn't inspire anything great from my Irish comedy.”

Now that Bishop is back in the States, he has had to learn to comedically navigate a much more expansive piece of geography (“East Coast to the Midwest through the Rockies, all the way to the West Coast…,” as he puts it) with folk possessing diverse opinions and approaches to life. 

Who to Pander to?

“It’s been very challenging to figure out who I want to present,” Bishop shares, adding, “like how much I want to present my political opinions onstage, how antagonistic I want to be, how little pandering I want to do. Who would you be pandering to if you were pandering? The thing is, there’s not the same uniformity n an audience that there once was. You know that there are going to be contentious things that you will talk about to certain people in the audience. So, it’s fun to figure out when that’s a positive, and when it's too much or taking away from the show.” 

What Bishop can’t figure out entirely is the reason for his more animated delivery since he has committed to being a U.S.-based performer, as displayed in his latest special, “Des Bishop: Of All People.” But he has an idea that it might have something to do with the coronavirus. 

“I think a little bit of it has to do with the pandemic,” Bishop surmises, “because I wrote a lot of bits which I never ended up recording because I didn’t like how angry everybody got about certain bits related to the pandemic because it became so much a part of the culture war, where you stood on things like vaccines, and the lockdown and masks. But I wrote some really good jokes about the pandemic that came and went very quickly because it was just a moment in time. 

“But there was an energy to them,” Bishop observes, “which maybe was inspired by just not having performed for a year. And when we came back, there was just an energy to them, like anger in me about what had happened in America that sort of like—I don't know—leaked into a lot of these other routines. I don't know. That wasn't a decision. That was just like an evolution.”

Insightful and Transparent

What Bishop notes of his current onstage demeanor is not to discount the stage time he got in Ireland. It may come from a less manic place in his personality, but his material as a native American in Ireland is no less insightful and transparent. In his docuseries In the Name of the Fada, he learns Ireland’s native language and performs sand-up in it. Bishop also immersed himself in Mandarin for the “Breaking China” series and a BBC World Service radio documentary about the growth of stand-up in China. Bishop’s forays into immersive comedy, however, began with an experiment in living on a dubiously livable wage. 

“The minimum wage thing was actually a fluke,” Bishop recalls, “in that idea was brought to me. I had, coincidentally, read Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Nickle and Dimed, and a person in charge of comedy development at Irish Television came to me and said that she had this idea about doing minimum wage jobs, but for a television documentary with sort of a comedic slant.”  The most personal outgrowth of what became The Des Bishop Work Experience is his tribute to his dad, who gave up a career in modeling and acting order to obtain more reliable employment for his family's sake. 

Of My Dad Was Nearly James Bond Bishop says, “It was very much about the effects of illness on a family. And also, obviously it was about fatherhood and things that weren't related to the illness, but it's a much more serious piece about how the immanence of death puts a lot of stuff in perspective.”

It wasn’t only bishop's father from whom he believes he got his comedic spar though. 

“Really, I attribute my comedy career as much to my mom as to my father because she was really more the argumentative one, and my dad was more like the ham. And he cared about how he looked and stuff. I definitely got that from him.”