Tonight we saw Des Bishop and it was great craic. For one thing, I laughed so hard that I couldn’t feel my face for a while (then again, when can you ever really feel your face…). The other interesting side of it was the reality flash I got when I realised that that dude in grey clothes was actually the same guy I had seen countless times on youtube . Unfortunately, I can’t even recall half of the funny stuff he said (but I suppose it will start coming back after a while when re-enacting the evening with Nici) and I couldn’t catch a whole lot of it on camera (even though there will be a video in a couple of days containing the film parts and some photos, too, you will probably see that both the video and the photos are a bit shaky which has to do a. with the fact that there were a shitload of excited girls all around us and b. with Des Bishop being incredibly hyper, there’s just no way you can get a steady picture of him….). My personal favourite however was when Des took off his jacket (you can see him wearing a blue jacket in the beginning and later it’s only a grey hoodie) and somebody in the crowd went “woooh!” and he said: “yeah, this is Ireland, when you take off ONE LAYER of clothing, people go ‘woooh!’, I’m still completely covered and people go ‘wooooh!’”.
The good thing about Des Bishop in my mind is that he doesn’t beat around the bush with stuff that he has done in his life, things he has experienced. He came to Ireland at age 14 because he got thrown out of school back in New York, he was heavily involved with drugs and alcohol and, if you take his word for it, going to Ireland changed his life forever. When he decided to go into comedy, he build up his stand-up around the experience of being an outsider to Ireland even if he, in America, had always defined himself as Irish (which is something I learned that Americans often do, they don’t identify necessarily with the state they’re from but if you ask them where they’re from they’ll tell you where in Europe their ancestors came from). Through his comedy he found his way of being Irish and he does his stuff very successfully and if I may say so, very well. Moreover, he is going to run in the Dublin Marathon on Monday (we’ll see whether we will be able to cheer for him), since he’s survived cancer himself he is very active for charities.
Given that the first of his two appearances was held entirely in Irish (in which I know how to say about three things), it can only be the case that Des Bishop is that good a comedian because I actually felt like I got a lot of the jokes even though I understood only like every twentieth or thirtieth word….
