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Caloroga Shark Media. Hello, I’m so excited to share this one with you. I’m Johnny Mack and my guest today is Des Bishop. He’s got a new special, it’s called Of All People. We recorded this on Monday, and I wanted to share it, like immediately.
I enjoy this conversation so much, but all the Hingecliff stuff was going on, so I kept it here in its normal scheduled Saturday slot. Some stuff about DES’s bio, grew up in Queen’s, flunked out of Saint Francis Prep, wound up living in Ireland, where he’s a very successful stand up comedian. He also speaks Mandarin and spent some time in China doing stand up. We’ll cover all that, we talk about Tony Hinchcliff, he’ll explain why the dogs are barking and the fireworks. And I just had so much fun talking to Des Bishop.
So I’m actually glad we were scheduled, were supposed to record this on Friday, and then you had an issue on your end. And my first question too, was going to be don’t you have a show in two hours? The hell are you talking? Yeah? Yeah?
Like literally, I was like driving down, and I was like, what was I thinking that I scheduled for this time? But you know what it is, It’s like when you’re in American mode and you’re scheduling, you’re not really thinking about like Irish time. Yeah, no, no problem at all. So that’s that’s up my second question, which is what is your pre show routine? I remember so my career is I’m really a radio executive and Jim Brewer used to do afternoon drive on the rod Up channel at Series XM when I was the boss, and I remember the first time I went out on the road with him.
He grabbed me, and I’m glad he did and he said, look, man, before I do a set, I totally shut down. I don’t want you to think I’m in a bad mood. I’m not pissed off at you, just like this is just how I roll. So like two hours before a show, don’t talk to me, of course not, but like what do you do? Well?
You know, if I’m driving and I’m basically just like getting there and then when I’m there, make sure everything’s set up, and then I just kind of like distract myself. Similar to Jim Brewer, except that I maintained my sanity into twenty twenty four, like Jim Brewer. But similar to Jim Brewer, I tell. Like relationships and people that I’m. Involved with that I can’t be around people, like if you’re expecting me to be a normal person, then you can’t be around me because I’m gonna be uptight, I’m gonna be a little anxious.
I’m not gonna be the best version of myself leading up to a show. Now it makes makes total sense since you open this door. Has Tony Hinchcliffe made the news in Ireland yet. Well, it’s hard for me to know if he’s made the news in Ireland because I’ve very much been on top of that story. So I mean, I have a lot of thoughts on all that stuff.
Can I just make a quick disclaimer the reason why I know that you’re not really a video guy, but I’m outside because fun fact about Ireland, Ireland does its fireworks for Halloween, not for the fourth of July, and it’s leading up to Halloween, so there’s a lot of fireworks. So the dog goes insane. So I’ve had to go outside and leave the dog inside so you may hear faint barking but it could be a lot worse. And trust me, when I’m not recording, it’s so much worse with me and the. Dog in the house.
But anyway, on the Tony Hinchcliff front, I mean, where do we start? So I try not to hang myself on this show. You know, people don’t come to this thing for politics. They come for me to speak with comedians. So my take on it.
And I’m not a comedian, never been a performer, but studied this enough to if I break it down just as a joke in no context, for example, during the Subway series, if I go to Los Angeles and I go, hey, there’s a floating pile of garbage on an island, it’s called Manhattan. If I do that during the World Series in LA that joke might fly. But in the context, in the room it was done, it takes on whole other connotations and it’s really not a good joke. It’s a one out of ten, two out of ten joke, Max. It’s dated on top of it, and I’m not like one to come after Tony Hinchcliff.
But in the context of the importance. Of the week and a half that we’re in leading up to an election, Like why you would choose like a dated target like Puerto Ricans, Like because obviously you can, like you just did, you can insert whatever island you want onto that joke. It’s it’s pretty basic. At the roast of Tom Brady, if they’re roasting like a Puerto Rican comic that was on the Dace, then you might go, Okay, you know, there’s a lot of that type of joke at roasts. But like when the world’s cameras are on you and you’re a comedian and it’s fine, you’ve been hired to make some jokes leading up to it, Like why you would choose that as your joke?
I mean you want to make that point like, oh, you can joke about anything, but it’s actually kind of like it’s juvenile, it’s immature, and it’s. Actually it’s really stupid. Like I actually think Trump is kind of stupid, So I think that like he would never think broad. Enough to go maybe I shouldn’t have a risky comedian on like this close to an election when certain states votes might literally hinge on twenty thousand people like it did in Georgia twenty two thousand people. He may have shifted enough votes to change a state that’s insane.
Well, I have so many topics, and when I gets to you and I are both New Yorkers, are both from Queens, so you know from the eighties and nineties. Trump is not like mister New York City. He’s not going to win New York. I just thought the whole thing it was a weird choice, like, go campaign in Pennsylvania. What are you doing in New York City.
This isn’t gonna work. Well, you know, nothing he does makes sense. And again we’re not going to get too political. But I think for him, he feels he wins regardless. You know, That’s what I think.
Like I think Trump thinks I’m gonna win. If I lose, I still can say that it was robbed and my profile is humongous, and I can continue with my current grift, which is the voice of the people that feel like they’ve been marginalized in Mardern America. So I don’t know if he even cares like I just feel like it’s a. Win win for him. The problem is that the whole political system just deteriorates all around his selfish you know notions and then I’m not a Republican, but the Republican Party continues to suffer.
Like the whole thing is, it’s. Absolutely crazy how much space and bandwidth has been given over to this ego.
And then people will the Trump people will obviously not agree with me, but Iā¦
It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. So over the politics in her back pocket before I go quoting, a comedian said, did you see Tony’s joke about rock paper scissors? I did, and again I like, fine, you know, I guess, but like read the room you need Michigan And actually I talked to. A Lebanese girl recently and they were like. She’s from Michigan, She’s from Grand Rapids, and they’re not happy with Kamala the Arabs in Michigan and some of them just out of virtue of their own anger towards common that we’re thinking maybe Trump can sort it out, and then he goes and basically like makes it very clear that they definitely do not care about the Palestinians.
So again, dumb joke. You know America. If, by the way, if that was an Ireland, he’d be lynched like the Irish. Oh you got to pay. The Irish are very The Irish perceive the Israeli.
Palestine conflict in terms of what the British did to Ireland has been done to the Palestinians. And I’m not taking a position. But I’m just telling you that that joke would not have flown over here at all.
All right, let’s switch over to Queens.
One of the things I try and do is not ask the same questions you’ve been asked ten thousand times. However, your particular story has some interesting curves along the way. Again, Irish kid from Queens, I’m probably seven eight years older than you, so when we’re twelve that matters, but at this age it doesn’t. What part of Queens are you from? I know in I’m from Jackson Heights, eighty seventh of Roosevelt, So I know in an interview they’ll say Flushing.
But are you from Main Street? Are you down by Booth Memorial orre you further out? Which grow up further out? I’m nearly Bayside. I’m really right on the border of fresh Meadows and Flushing where and.
Just just west of Bayside, so actually near enough to where Trump grew up. I just grew. I grew right off Utopia Parkway. He was a few miles down the road in Jamaica States, off Utopia Parkway. My mother, though, as a youngster, hung out a lot in Jackson Heights because it was quite irish back in those days.
But I’m very much like Eastern Queen’s. I don’t like to admit this. But it has more like Long Island vibes than oh, sure city vibes. You know, oh yeah sure. Once you get out past the seven train, you know, maybe another mile or two now with all the development, Oh my god.
I was on the Van Wick last week and I couldn’t believe that development and flushing. But once you get out there, yeah, it’s you know, Queen’s just kind of softly switches into Nassau. They’ve renamed it since, but there was like that ten block stretch where one side of the street was Jamaica Avenue. On the other side was like, no, no, no, we’re Jericho Turnpike. Like, we’re not Jamaica Avenue.
What are you talking about? Well, you know, you pay less property tax when you’re on the Queens side. But officially, my neighborhood, by the way was called Auburndale. So if you’re ever on the Long Island Railroad where Auburndale station. Again, I’m back to Trump.
You just reminded me when he during COVID he started talking about walking past Elmhurst Hospital, which is eighty second and Broadway, a couple of blocks south of the seventh. I’m like, in what world were you walking on Broadway in Jackson Heights? Illmers never once? Dude? Yeah, and if he had, he walked by Elmhurst Hospital.
Who you know, it was a shit show back then. But honestly, I was there recently because I went to the met game actually, and I ended up parking on Junction Boulevard and we walked from when we were done, myself my wife walked from City Field back to Junction Boulevard. And I mean, like, you could travel the world on Roosevelt Avenue. I don’t care what anybody says. I actually the taxi driver that took me to JFK for this trip that I’m on right now, he was a Dominican guy, and he was telling me that he didn’t think Roosevelt Avenue was safe.
But I told him, I said, listen, man, I walked back late at night, right past Corona Plaza, and I thought the whole thing was exciting, you know, and you really feel like you’re in all these different parts of the world as you make your way further west towards the city. My dad would be so proud of you. So he was a bartender where mcdermidt’s. He worked at Blarney Stone, So you know the kind of guy I’m talking about. And he taught me growing up, you don’t pay the park you park over in Corona, And to this day, I’ll still park on like one twelfth in Northern and walk And remember when my son was little, he’d be like, what the hell are we doing.
I’m like, I’m not paying thirty bucks to park. This just isn’t that what you do? Well? Your dad wouldn’t be proud of me, because the reason I had to do it was because I got there too late and it was all and they were trying to get me to park in College Point. At the Skyview.
The game had already started, so I said, screwed that, I whipped onto the Grand Central. I was to be honest, I was actually gonna park in LaGuardia and get an uber, but then I was like, nah, nah, I just I’ll park on Junction Boulevard around there and I’ll jump on the seven. So that’s what I did. But then we walked back. That’s good.
Where’s Hannah from? Was she like? What’s up with Rosevelt? She’s from Brooklyn’s nothing to her. Yeah, none of this is too intimidating, you know, but she was in Park Slope but her grandfather bought that house, so like, they’re not like fancy Park Slope people.
In fact, her actually her dad grew up with Colin Quinn and his family, so uh, age wise, I fit somewhere between Colin Quinn and Hannah. But but Colin Quinn. Got quite the kick out of the fact that I ended up marrying Dan Berner’s daughter because they all grew up together in Park Slope. Love this guy more as Bishop in a minute, not to step on your material about your name. When I saw I was like, yeah, that’s an Irish guy.
Like I never I don’t want to do the joke, but like I was like, yeah, no, guy’s name Desmond. Yes, but I didn’t know any Desmonds growing up. That’s not an exaggeration on the joke. The only Desmond I knew, which you might have also known, was Desmond’s Pub on Park Avenue in like thirty something. I used to always see that and be like, yo, it’s my name because it was such a rare And obviously Bishop Desmond tutu, which is I talk about the joke, But yeah, not Honestly, I did not know many Desmonds growing up.
But I also was not aware until adulthood that black people in America consider it a consider it a black name. I didn’t know either. All right, So you’re growing up, You’re in Queen’s You’re going to Saint Francis Prep. That makes sense now that you’ve told me where you’re growing up. And depending on which article I read, you either got kicked out, asked to leave, chose to leave, got sent to Ireland, chose to go to Ireland.
Which version of that is accurate? I mean, essentially the majority of those things are true. They can all true together. Like I absolutely flunked out. You know, if you fail more than two subjects, you’re not allowed.
To come back. So I got kicked out. I mean we certainly that’s what we said, Like I got kicked out of prep. But obviously when somebody says they got kicked out of school. It sounds more dramatic than it is, but like I just had a severe lack.
Of interest in school. I mean, there was other things that were going on that I think in the modern day education system perhaps I would have gotten like more support. But that aside, I did flunk out. My mother was freaking out about what I was going to do. She was really thinking that I was on a bad path.
I was drinking a lot, but that had nothing to do with why I got kicked out of school.
And then a cousin put the idea in my head and I suggested it to my parents, sā¦
I did actually want to go, but at the same time, my parents did allow me to go, and did organize it, and did do it in a out of a fear that I screwing up my life. It’s an aggressive choice so to catch up the audience. So you go to school in Queens. If you don’t go to public school. If you’ve got good grades, you’re probably going to Maloy.
If you’ve got bad grades, you’re probably going Tom Clancy. Saint Francis was like a middle school there. Well, actually the St. Francis Prep people would would not take kindly to you suggesting that Prep was below Maloy because they they definitely had equal status in like the eyes of the co op system and everything. I apologize to Saint France.
But that’s okay. The difference really was the smart people that were really into women went to San Francisco. Yes, Maloy was an al boys school back in. The time at the time, but why not christ Stefanie went to Maloy, by the way, why not dropped out of a clancy? Well, actually I would have went to Holy Cross.
That would have been where I ended up. Uh, but I don’t know. I never got to the stage where I had to pick another New York school because I really thought the idea of going to Ireland was like really cool. Actually, and my mother, see, we had a cousin that was going through some addiction stuff, and my mother really was freaking out that I was going to get in big trouble. So when this Irish thing came up and she looked into it and it was kind of cheap by relative standards of going to boarding school in the United States, she just had this thing in her head that I’d be safer there.
I think that’s really what she thought. Honestly, for me, it was a real win because not only did I get a better education because I was away from my distractions. I was in an all boys boarding school. You get supervised study, but I also got the education of suddenly living in a new culture, having to adapt. You know, there’s just so much about what happened that was good for me specifically.
I don’t think it’s for everybody, but me specifically easily distracted, wanting attention, you know, like suddenly being the kid from New York in a small Irish boarding school is actually kind of like exciting for me. So I kind of got everything I needed out of my Irish experience. I find it interesting you’ve held your I would never sniff you out, except when you say Ireland as both three syllables the way I would pronounce it. Yeah, and there’s there’s other there’s other words if we were talking for a while.
Also, if an Irish person suddenly sat next to me, like my accent would shift ā¦
But I never had more than a bit of an Irish accent. But I definitely had more than I have now. Well, you went over there, what early nineties, mid nineties, ninety nineteen ninety ninety, all right, So that’s what a lot of people were coming over from there to here to New York because of the economy, and the Irish were opening bars. I used to hang out at a bar called the Brefnee on Fortieth and Queen’s. No it well, okay, oh it well.
So the name of their softball team, and I didn’t get it at first, and once when I found out what it was, I was like, oh, that’s interesting. They called themselves the Provos. They had provosse. That’s so funny because that’s such a quintessential Irish American experience, like you could so I have tons of jokes about coming to Ireland. The first joke I used to have was that there was a sign at the airport that said wrong way, because I was the only American coming back to Ireland.
Everybody was going the other way. In reference to the first thing you said. But I also had a joke about how I mean it was a baptism of fire because as you know from the team being called the Provos. For those that don’t know, the Provos was slang for the Provisional IRA, which in Irish America, you know, you were raised to love the Iray. I mean, I was up thet all of my childhood and when I came to Ireland, to my great surprise, people in the Republic of Ireland were not They did not support the IRA.
In fact, they were kind of horrified by the whole thing. And I didn’t get any fights, but I had a lot of arguments with people. I was kind of shocked. Obviously I got educated and develop my own nuanced take on it. But the fact that you could call a softball team the Provos that would not have been happening in Dublin in nineteen ninety four, for example.
It’s crazy to you know, it’s almost like a hack station wagon kids in the backbit. But that the IRA would come to New York and just openly do fundraisers thirty years ago, like what. Nor aid, Well, my parents were right in the thick of that. I mean, we were as provo as they come. As far as Irish American families go, we had carvings of Celtic crosses that were made in Long Catch prison by IRA prisoners.
We marched for County Down. See, my mother’s father was from the North. My mother worked for Odran Bernstein, a law firm that represented fought against extradition of IRA members that were being held in American prisons. I mean we were in the heart of pro IRA Irish America. I mean when we marched down Fifth Avenue, the signs were like get the Brits out, you know, BRIT’s out.
And like when we sold our house in twenty fifteen, when I cleaned out the attic, there was like, you know, marching band instruments that we had been storing in our attic with BRIT’s out and twenty six plus six equals one stingers on them, and you know, like just like I was kind of shocked, Like as an adult man who spent actually most of his life in Ireland in the end, I was shocked at the just overtly Republican propaganda that I. Was raised around, you know, yeah, you know, and as an Irish American we were into U two when they were a little more political. Then a little later on I’d go see Black forty seven and Patty Riley’s and sure Larry’d me up there sing in the sun. Yeah, Larry Carr. And the funny thing is that Black forty seven is a great band actually, but very much Irish American band Irish and he was from Wexford actually, which is where I ended up going to boarding school for three years.
You know, I always say to Irish people because I do jokes. Actually, I did a show about my mom, you know, but after my mom died, I did like a like a one man show about my mother. But I had a whole section about the Irish American Republican experience, and I made make fun of myself for what happened when I came to Ireland. But I would definitely say that it’s somewhere in the middle between the way I was raised as sort of a naive kind of provo upbringing and the overly critical Irish people in the eighties and nineties that were perhaps overly critical of the ira perhaps didn’t have an understanding of the complexities of the North. I would say it’s probably somewhere in the middle of those two positions is the better position.
And you know what’s hilarious is that, well it’s not hilarious. But the young Irish people now they’re inclined to support shin Faine, which was the political party of the IRA and they don’t have the baggage from the troubles, so young Irish people sort of look to them as a sort of an anti establishment party that can fight against the housing crisis and all these issues that we have in the States too, but a different government gets blamed. You’re making me smile and thinking about my mom. And it wasn’t racism. It was some sort of tribalism that you know.
So and so, Oh they’re not Irish, we don’t like them. Okay, now they’re Irish, but they’re from the wrong county. Or oh the bishops, those green horns. We don’t like that. You know, everything was wrong.
You had to be like a first cousin or forget it. Yeah, well, I actually I have a company in arting, know id like a like a limited company, and I called it blowing entertainment. Most people don’t know the term blowing, but in. Ireland it’s a big term for somebody who lives in a place, but isn’t from there, And obviously I’m a blow into Ireland. But like Irish people can be blowing’s if you move from one village to another, you know.
So I called my company Blowing Entertainment and there’s a lot of that. Well, here’s a funny story about you’re talking about, like, not racism or tribalism. This is how ignorant in a way. My mother raised us because I remember, do you remember the movie The Great Outdoors or The Mosquito Coast. Yeah, so there was two redheaded twins in those two movies, and we were working on a modeling job for that we modeled as kids for Ford Miling Agency and the mother was Irish.
As far as I was concerned, I heard her accent. She was Irish and my mother after the conversation, the woman left and I said, oh, she was a nice woman, and my mother said, yeah, but she’s a Northern Irish Protestant. She put it right into my head that this person can’t be a good person because he’s a Protestant from the North. And I joke about that now to people because it’s it’s that’s insane that she thought that was okay. The other term that it’s a bit of a hack bit.
But you’ll know where I’m going here. But when I was hanging out in those Irish bars and the Irish would ask me if in New York City in the early nineties, if I wanted to go find some crack. Yes, that was a word loosely translated as let’s go find good fun, not rock cocaine. Yes, c R A I C. But she’s not actually Irish, but it has really that like it’s not from the Irish language.
That’s like a like a like a fake etymology. It’s it’s just a word that’s evolved out of there’s like three or four competing claims on the etymology of crack. However, these days it’s certainly not a guelga, it’s not an Irish language word, but it is one hundred percent the Irish word for fun. But because my wife is obsessed with crack now, because when we first met. That’s my first by the way, Hannah Berner is obsessed with crack.
But when we first met, I actually said to her, I said, one of the things that I immediately connected with is you don’t know what the crack is, but like you have the crack, like you are like quintessential crack, but you don’t get it. She still can’t explain it to people. And it’s very hard to explain what the crack is because the crack is not just almost like a like a way of being that can be hard to explain to people that aren’t Irish. She actually got in trouble the other day because she posted a clip and kind of tried to suggest that Irish and English people are into this thing called crack, and the Irish were like, it has nothing to do with the English. So it’s the twenty first century.
We have to put labels on everything. Every article about you in the States calls you Irish comedian to the. Irish Irish American? Are you American comedian as bishop like, because your style is you know, if I had a graph, you know you’re closer to the Bill Burr and than the Tommy Tiernan end. Yeah.
But you know, if you watch my early, really early stuff, I was coincident funny that I’m not inspired by Bill Burr at all, which is hilarious that I get a lot of comparisons to him now. However, I was very inspired by. Tommy Tuner in the early part of my career, and when I watch my bits from two thousand and one to three, I can see Tommy’s influence. On my style. And these days, unfortunately, I just get the Bill Burr comparisons, I think because we’re both like middle aged northeastern guys with like a kind of a and I’ve gone back to my de facto energy, which is kind of a queen’s guy energy, working class queen’s guy.
That’s not an artistic choice, that’s just who I am. You know. In Ireland, it wasn’t as obvious because I had a lot, not old, but a lot of material talking about Ireland and talking about the differences between America and Ireland, and also quite a keen awareness for a foreigner as far as Irish concerned, quite a keen awareness of like regional sensibilities and differences between Irish areas, and I could do the accents. So it’s not that the queen sense, the queen’s energy is not as obvious in a lot of those bits, because it’s obviously like not coming from that. But these days, when I’m expressing my frustration with the modern world, frustration with the differences between generations, or my frustration with America in general.
Og kind of Queen’s energy comes out and if you watch, like I put my mother in a couple of things over the years, like documentaries, and like, if you watch her ramage, you go, oh, it’s not Bill Burt that this guy’s inspired by. It’s Island Bishop. You know, she’s pissed off about everything. Yeah. I think my comparison there was about energy and the current specials a little more rad of tat tat than the themes the theme pieces, which is what I wanted to ask you about that evolution.
There is it a choice? Is it just what you’re feeling now that it’s it’s less of a theme power. I think it’s more necessity is the mother of invention, Like working in the States, working the clubs, doing fifteen minute spots at the cellar. I I just those long bits. You know, it’s just like my fifteen minute spot isn’t going to be about one thing, you know, just going around America, Like I’m just not going to get with bar staff floating around people not knowing who you are, Like you just don’t.
I don’t think you get the license to indulge in a theme in the same way. And I don’t even like the fact that there’s like a separation. Like people will be like, oh, it’s like a Verbiglia type show. Obviously, I’m sure you know this side of the water. Verbiglia type comedy is just comedy.
But so I don’t even like the fact that there’s there’s two types. But for me, it’s been, I think, like an upgrade to my skill level to have not been able to lean on that. Like, I think, obviously there’s tricks in every type of comedy, but I think that perhaps there were have been too many times, not always, but too many times in my comedy career where I had the crutch of a theme, which gives you maybe too much freedom to not be as punchy as you would need to be in Philadelphia on a Saturday night at ten thirty, you. Know, yeah, and in the age of social media and you got to feed the beast and all that. And my audience is sick of me telling this, but the amount of times I’ll be watching an hour and my wife shows up thirty six minutes in, stands there for five seconds and goes, is this guy funny?
And you know I want to hit pause and be like, well, you see what he just did. There, he’s at up eighteen minutes ago to let me throw back and a misdirect, and it’s like, you know. Oh, I mean I have I have so many like I watch. I had a great special back in two thousand and eight called Tongues, and it was a two part special. One part was all about the Irish language, which is why I called it Tongues.
The other part is just material that was relevant to Ireland at that time, which was actually right at the sort of the an inkling that the world economy was about to crash, which is funny because it’s a moment in time. But anyway, I have a very strong, what I think is a very strong finishing sort of fifteen minutes, but it’s very interconnected and very woven. Like my punchline. My special finishes with a joke that makes absolutely no sense unless you’ve watched the first part of that fifteen minutes, and so I had a lot of that back in the day, and I. Still think that stuff is great.
One of the great things about because that’s the other thing when I said necessity is the mother intertention. Clips being the currency of modern comedy, I obviously had to have jokes that stood alone. The great thing about clips is that if you can make clippable jokes work still within the confines of these great fifteen twenty minute bits, essentially your fifteen twenty minute bit still works the same. As it used to. It’s just so much better.
That’s what I think. One more breaking back with des Bishop, you have a piece of crowd work in your current special that I will not spoil at all. But as soon as I hit play, I was like, oh, this is amazing, so that hopefully. That’s not a spoiler. We could talk about.
That, okay, So for the audience, the clip opens up with crowd work and suddenly you burst into Mandarin and I’m like, holy yes, who is this guy? Well, this is amazing. Well your reaction is literally why that bit is there? And I really got a credit Shane Gillis because Hannah said why don’t you? And this wasn’t like a Shane Gillis bit, but Shane Gillis on his YouTube special I think, or maybe it was his Netflix special.
He opens cold open to crowd work, or he cold opens to a bit. It’s not like, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the state. Shane gillis, uh, and that’s very effective in the modern world where you just have to grab people’s attention. So Hannah said, why don’t you open with the Mandarin crowd work and people will just be like, oh shit, this is not what I normally see. And that’s why that exists.
And obviously that bit, despite the fact that it sounds complicated, the crowd work of finding somebody that speaks Mandarin and joking with them in Mandarin, I mean, it works so well for me. In fact, one of the things that made my transition back to the States so much easier was because so much of my material about spending time in China, which obviously takes a bit of time to explain right now, we’re just jumping in to it, but the material I had from my experience in China really translated very easily to America, in fact, better in America. Than in Ireland. So I had no problem chucking that bit of crowd work up top, because I know it’s funny. It’s funny without any awareness of China.
It’s got a pretty good punchline right at the end. And so everything you experienced is by design. It’s amazing. So what makes you go to China to be a stand up and that’s an aggressive play. Yeah, I mean again, that was one thing led to another.
But the very quick list of reasons how I ended up in China was one, I became very friendly with Chinese people on my first documentary project, which was about living on minimum wage. Two it just so happened that the years leading up to that, I was actually studying kung fu with a cifu from Hong Kong who took us to Chinese dim sum every Sunday afternoon and was very into teaching us about Chinese culture, which then helped me to connec with those Chinese people who brought me to China on a vacation in two thousand and four. I was fascinated by China and its difference to the West. Separate to that, but at the same time, my neighborhood, which we’ve discussed Flush and Queens, became completely Chinese in my lifetime, and my next door neighbors who I would shovel snow with if I was back visiting my parents, they couldn’t speak English, and I really became fascinated with like trying to communicate with them. So then when I made a project in Ireland about learning the Irish language, which was a very Irish project, and everyone in Ireland has to learn Gaelican school, so that was like an easy project to do in Ireland.
But once I realized, oh, I’m not bad at. Learning languages, I pitched the idea of doing that in China, to learn Chinese to do stand up in Mandarin. And that’s the quickest version of a very long story about how I went to China. Did you mentally write in matter in or did you write in English and translate it one. Hundred percent mentally wrote in Mandarin.
Fact, people always say like it must be hard to come up with jokes, you know, because they think of it in terms of translation, and people like Eddie is a great guy, but he takes his show and figures it out in another language and then does it, and he’s done that in numerous languages. But I was trying to do something else, which was I was trying to turn my experiences in China into stand up. So actually, once I got somewhat a bit of an understanding about the language, I was able to use my basic Mandarin to tell my fish out of Water stories, and the majority, I’d say only twenty or thirty percent of my jokes actually in Mandarin work in English. The ones that I do in the special are ones that work in English. Some of them don’t actually work in Mandarin because they’re they’re just different.
But most of my stuff in Mandarin works. Not because of translation, but because it’s about things that are about China. They don’t make sense in English or they don’t make sense to people that I’ve into China. So is it more storytelling? Is it raditat tat?
Or is it I don’t know. I didn’t know how to use the laundry machines and they find humor that the white guy didn’t know what to do. I mean, you can be sure, because the difficulty level is pretty high that I leaned on the easier topics. Fish out of water, mispronunciation jokes, you know, just I guess the entry level things you find funny as somebody who moves to try and trust to learn Mandarin and is clearly not Chinese. You’re a white guy.
You stand out all those things. So I leaned on that as much as possible.
And then some basic observations jokes about like the stress around Chinese Nā¦
And that’s about as far as I got in terms of like the difficulty level of my Chinese humor, Like I was only able to tell the jokes that I could with my basic level of Mandarin and my basic understanding of Chinese life. What kind of rooms are these? By the way, the sound effects for this episode, or I’m so glad you’re outside, I’m so glad you explained the fireworks and the dog because this is going to sound amazing as a pod. I’m loving it. What kind of room?
I’m so embarrassed. Actually the whole thing is very embarrassing. But I guess it’s interesting because Hannah had no idea that Halloween was the fireworks time. So well, at my time in China, the rooms were bar shows because it’s not a thing, you know, It wasn’t like stand up was a new thing in China, and it was these small pockets in Beijing, Shanghai, Shinjin, Chungdu of people that were like seeing it on the internet, Western people doing stand up and some nerdy comedy fans were like, you know, putting the Chinese Mandarin subtitles at the bottom, and they were seeing like clips from the oscars and clips from the Tonight Show and thinking, oh, let’s do that. So I was in the very early stages of that.
So that’s largely the types of rooms I was doing. Was that. Joe Wang. I don’t know if you have an interviewed him, but he actually made his career in the States. He said, from China, Chinese immigranty the United States, but did really well stand up in English, did a couple of really big letterman sets and really was amazing stand.
Up to be honest, like really astute. Observations, but again a little fish out of water, but classic Chinese guy play on words, a little mathematical. Anyway, he blew up because he roast to Joe Biden when he was vice president and it went viral in China, so viral that he went back to China to do because he was famous, and he’s had quite the career in China since I was there, actually since that time, and the only big shows I did were opening up for him. But he was doing stand up in Mandarin, but he was struggling with doing stand up and manner as much as I was, because his comedy brain was very much fish out of water comedy in English, about being in America. He had to almost find a different identity speaking as a Chinese person from the northeast of China, just speaking about modern China.
So that was the only time I did like a theater was with him. We’re worried about the censors, and obviously you’re not gonna lose your mind and get up and you know, do five minutes about the government. But are you worried about maybe stepping on something you don’t even know as a landmine culturally? I mean, yeah, you would definitely worry about stepping on a landmine. In terms of like being that in the room that night.
I mean, you’re definitely not gonna You’re not going to be the asshole who you know, does stuff that’s going to make the crowd uncomfortable because they think that this is too subversive. In a place where that’s not safe, you can touch on stuff I made a joke and actual show about One of the great things about China is comedy is always about finding the line and just crossing it just a little bit, but a lot of times you don’t know where the line is, Like we’re joking about Tony Hinchcliffe, like he totally misjudged the line and now there’s chaos right Whereas in China the line is very clear. The things you don’t talk about and if you do, you go to jail. The joke is always three teased. He had him into bet Taiwan.
But I wasn’t interested in causing any trouble. Wasn’t my job. I mean, I could go on about this topic for a long time, but it’s gotten a lot worse in China since I was there, so actually there’s even less freedom of speech there than when I was there. But what I will say is that stand up in itself, it’s kind. Of subversive there in the sense that our Western style stand up is individualistic, and it’s like often not always, but often personal.
You’re speaking about your life in a way that wouldn’t be quintessential Asian culture. And these young men and women that are going up there and saying joking about their difficult relationships with their parents, breaking Chinese cultural norms, not political stuff, but Chinese cultural norms, talking about dating stuff like that. In China, it’s actually it’s pretty subversive. It’s pretty challenging to the audience in a way that we don’t appreciate because we’re post sexual revolution, we’re post being able to criticize religion where we’re we’re going backwards. But largely we live in a situation where we can say whatever we want without fear of, uh, you know, upsetting people to the point that it’s going to cause our lives, you know, more issues than being canceled.
Right, So the whole thing was more impressive than it sounds when you say, oh, well, I couldn’t joke about the government, or I couldn’t talk about Tianaman or Tibet. You know, I’ll head for home here. You’ve been very generous with your time. My daughter was snooping my calendar. She texts me.
She’s like, I sawna calendar. You’re talking to danz Bychev. Do you know he’s married too, She’s in her early twenty I’m like, yes, yes, but that’s I’m not going to ask forty five minutes of questions about Hannah. But she was very excited. Are you seeing an audience pick up in the States because of the podcast?
I mean, honestly, there was an immediate pickup just from my association with Hannah, and the more popular she got, the more I would get people that would support me because they became aware of me through Hannah originally. But that was usually just like a small group. The podcast a little bit, but I really feel that the bigger thing has been the clips. I mean, there’s definitely some podcast people, but the clips have been the bigger thing. But I think that some of those clips probably went more viral because people were like sharing them because they were like, this is Hannah’s husband.
So, without a doubt, there has been positive career associations with. Being married to Hannah. But I must point out that when I met Hannah, she had only done a year of stand up. Stand up had been. Stopped because of COVID, and you know, it was a very different time I’m in her career and like actually because you know, the reality stuff finished, so like stressfully, it wasn’t an immediate sense of wow, this has been amazing for my career, and it was more like, wow, this has been very difficult for my mental health.
Are you are you a stand up for life? Do you want to act? And I’m asking that because you’ve got great hair game. Well, it’s not that great today. I did go to the gym and have a shower, but I did not brush my hair nor blow dry.
But sorry, I mean there was always in my mind like I would love to do movies, but I never. Wanted to do auditions or put in. The hard yards because well, I think not all but a lot of stand ups are kind of like not control freaks. But you just get used to sort of like making your own work, putting your own work on, and there’s a freedom to that. Acting is very much like weight and see, so I always kind of hope that something would like fall on my lap.
A couple of things have, but not to any huge extent. And I have done plenty of auditions throughout the years, but nothing easy ever came my way. So yes, I would still act, but stand up and writing, and you know, you want to know the truth. Actually, I always thought that as I got older, I would settle into radio, but. The industry just changed.
So actually me too, I’m doing a podcast date. Yeah, so uh, and I what I miss? I mean, I still go and do radio interviews, but and I got actually before I turned down two pretty good radio offers to go to China just coincidentally enough, I filled in for two Irish radio presenters on two different radio stations, and they both offered me quite good jobs after filling in for the week, and at both of those offers, I just was like, listen, I’m going to China. And I saw that as something for a little bit later in my life. I just didn’t know that within the next decade that industry would change and all so that I would want to spend a bit more time in the state.
So I wasn’t looking for like an Irish radio job, but I do like the formality of five days a week on the radio, producer up bit of focus time in the office, Like I think podcasting is slowly kind of essentially becoming that, but I haven’t found that model, and I miss the way it used to be in that not all areas of the industry, but I do miss that type of focus. It was fun. A big bulk of my career is producing radio shows. And just like you’re saying, the relationship between a producer and a host, and especially like if I’m producing you and I’m giving you the side like you, we have to have that circle of trust of like, dude, you’re going off the rails here, trust me. It’s like trust me, trust me and giving you and I’m doing out of habit on the video here giving your hand signals or you know, hey, wrap it up, are you going to hang yourself here?
Get out of this? Let’s go. Yeah, it’s radio is dead. It is. But what I do think will happen because I always say to Hannick is kind of like a very good podcaster, and I guess somewhat of a pioneer female podcast certainly was pretty early into the game.
But I feel that over time. Some of that formality will return because the money is there, and I think to maintain an audience, the standards have to be there, the sense of fresh ideas, keeping it interesting. Like a lot of podcasts are great, but they’re like a moment in time, and then when that moment passes, then it’s like where do we go from here? Like all that stuff will naturally be necessary. So I do think that some of the formality of the way it used to be will come back.
And the last thing I always say to Hannaz. The one thing podcasting is really lacking is the sense of its happening right now. For certain issues, certain types of radio. I think that still has value, and I think that that will be the next evolution. Is a better way of listening live other than oh this podcaster goes live on YouTube.
But it’s not the same. Yeah, no, it’s not the same. It will not surprise me if I used to work a serious If they open up a bag of cash for Hannah and she winds up with a station and they pay, well, just say yes. Well, as it turns out, they actually didn’t give Hannah a great offer, but they Hannah’s doing fine. But Sirius was one of the low bowlers, a really well.
I probably get in trouble to say. I probably shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t evean. Whatever. Such is life.
Appreciate your time today, man, this is awesome. Thank you so much. Wasn’t he fantastic? I loved him. I could have talked to him for another hour, but you know, you ask for twenty minutes and he keep forty five.
Yeah, you gotta let people go at some point. But he was so easy to talk to. Des Bishop especial is called of all people. You will find it on YouTube. See you back here tomorrow.