Des Bishop: Lately
Olympia Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Dressed dapperly all in black, like a priest without the dog collar, Des Bishop is preaching to the choir on Wednesday night, orchestrating an impromptu Catholic karaoke session by persuading a large part of the audience to sing along to eternal bangers such as Here I Am, Lord and Be Not Afraid.
Think Fr Buzz Cagney of Beverly Hills parish, Fr Ralph de Bricassart of The Thorn Birds or Andrew Scott’s Hot Priest from Fleabag. Bishop doesn’t have an audience so much as a congregation of the faithful. Even the hecklers are compared to those annoying crying babies at Mass.
He admits that this material requires a critical mass of audience members who’ve been forced to go to church for years. When he performed it in New York City nobody sang, whereas in Ireland it’s been more a case of “One more tune!”
Unlike previous shows, Lately lacks a strong theme or focus, being more of a status update. The Irish-American comic recalls buying a place in Rialto in Dublin in 2005, having been told it was up and coming. “Like sex on ecstasy, it took a long time to come.” When Covid loomed he swapped Dolphin’s Barn for Long Island, fearing that an inner-city lockdown might tempt him to seek the wrong sort of injections.
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He lucked out, meeting and marrying the US comedian and reality-TV star Hannah Berner, 16 years his junior. When a few women boo he responds, “I was 47, and I was a dirty whore, so you had your chance.”
Lucky you finding love, you might think, until you remember that previous shows have been inspired by his father’s terminal illness, his mother’s death and his testicular cancer.
[ Des Bishop: 'I never felt the grief with my dad like I felt with my motherOpens in new window ]
How many people here are over 40, he asks. The resulting cheers confirm his suspicion that he and his audience are growing old together. He recounts recently being stopped in the street in Dublin and asked for a selfie by a young woman, and thinking “I‘ve still got it”, until she tells him it’s for her mother. “She loves you.” It’s funny, just as it waswhen it happened to Steve Martin’s character Charles-Haden Savage in the TV series Only Murders in the Building.
Perhaps it’s his relationship’s age gap that makes him dwell on generational differences. His young relative Bella lives for free in his Rialto flat, he says, but shows more attitude than gratitude. He has little sympathy for teenagers complaining of parents using their phones to monitor them. At least they are no longer physically assaulted as a rule. “Tracked or smacked – take your pick.”
Young love in his day required patience, a reply to a love letter taking up to a week compared with today’s instant communication. He has fun imagining the practical difficulties of taking a “dick pic” in the predigital age and recalls making do for erotic inspiration with Mills & Boon and Danielle Steele.
Bishop doesn’t dwell too much on the Donald Trump presidency other than to say he is finished with rebutting Irish people for saying that Americans are “tick” (as in thick).
He recalls his father’s relationship advice, when asked whether he should hold out for the hot girl he fancied or go with the less-attractive girl who fancied him. “Take your points and the goals will come.” It gets a laugh, but interrogating such a toxic male outlook would make for a sharper set.
Bishop is good on class, imagining an Irish reality-TV show set on a middle-class estate based on neighbours’ objections when a planning application goes up. He is great with accents, too, not just the usual posh and working-class Dublin and the addict’s nasal delivery but the more off-piste Wexford accent, good enough to play the lead in a Billy Roche play.
One advantage of ageing is that he has become a silver fox while his Italian-American contemporaries, whom he once envied for hitting puberty years before him, have grown fat and bald. Their other advantage that he once jealously eyed was the way their mothers loved them. “I’m not saying mine didn’t, she just never told me.”
This reminds me of his father Michael’s line from Bishop’s memoir, My Dad Was Nearly James Bond, about having children – “It’s not your life any more, it’s their life” – and if you begrudge handing it over they will know.
He ponders whether he might become a father himself, joking a little lamely that needing a knee brace after a skiing accident suggests he might not be fit to actually raise one.
New material is obviously not the best reason to have a child, but Bishop’s Love Child has a certain ring to it – and is a bit of an Irish-American tradition.
