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[title]Once upon a time, a twenty-something Joanne McNally was battling with her friends over whose turn it was to sleep in the singular bed in their shambles of a flat on Fitzroy Street, St Kilda.
“I did that obligatory year in Australia someone from Ireland always does,” she tells me from a more glamorous-looking hotel where she is on the Perth leg of her The Prosecco Express tour. “I got shit jobs and lived with dozens of other Irish people in what would generously be described as a squat.”
Fast forward almost two decades later, and the Irish stand-up comedian, writer and podcaster is set to upgrade from floor to stage with her glittering debut at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The comedian has been busy performing in Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Sydney, but at the tail-end of this week, she will give a cork-popping performance at the Athenaeum Theatre.
McNally started the The Prosecco Express tour in December 2021, and ever since, the train has barely had time to screech to a halt. She has already toured Ireland and the UK, selling out theatres, and after Australia she is set to perform in New Zealand and Dubai. How on earth does she muster the fuel to keep chugging on?
“The shows do take it out of you, so I need my downtime and some silence during the day,” she confesses. “I have to put my poor suffering boyfriend on a silent tap sometimes because he can rabbit on all day. I’m like, please, please, please, quiet time.”
Hailing from Killiney, County Dublin, McNally has been taking the comedy scene by storm in recent years with her sell-out tours, chat show appearances and newspaper articles. Frankly, she has fitted a lifetime of achievements into a matter of years, including selling out a record 62-night tour at Dublin’s iconic Vicar Street. It’s hard to believe she only got her career revving in her early thirties. Still, she attests pursuing comedy was a “complete accident”.
A fortuitous twist of fate, but make no mistake, it has been far from a smooth sail. After working as a publicist in her twenties, McNally had to leave her job and enter treatment for bulimia and anorexia. While she was an outpatient, a friend of hers was starting a show called Singlehood where anyone could get up on stage and ramble about relationships.
“I started telling this story about this guy I never wanted to date in the first place, but he still broke up with me,” McNally recalls with a subtle pang of rage. “Obviously, I became bonkers about him, and because I was unwell then, I thought a man could fix me. A comedian saw the show and encouraged me to try stand-up, and I thought I could never have the confidence to do that. I think a lot of the eating disorder stemmed from feeling like I wasn’t enough."
At that time, my main and only purpose was to be good at being thin.
Still, McNally decided to “dip her toe” into comedy and overnight, a very dark period in her life became her brightest, and her first one-woman show Bite Me scored her multiple award nominations.
“[Bullimia] is something I know a lot of people struggle with, and I found a way to fill it that was healthy… ish. In hindsight, it was a series of totally fortunate events that started with a pretty intense mental illness,” she chuckles with her signature levity. "Sometimes you got to crack through like a crème brûlée to get to the good stuff.”
The vivacious comedian never shies away from dealing with taboo topics and, with the utmost candour, looks inward to foster a connection with her audience. Whether it’s tackling ideas about “biological clocks” or being left “on the shelf”, her rapport will strike a chord in any woman who has ever felt an iota of societal pressure.
“I think, as a comic, you need to be out there living a life, so you have stuff to write about. The last thing you want is to be content and happy; you need the drama and the darkness,” she admits. “Now I’m onto the next topic, which is men, sex, my friends and my mother.”
Goodness knows what the next show will be. I’ll probably have to become a surrogate.
You can expect no surrogates but musings on teetering on the edge of midlife in The Prosecco Express, where McNally hones in on having no kids, pension or long-term plan.
“I turn 40 this year, so when I wrote the show, I was still single and 'unfertilised'. The reason I called it The Prosecco Express is that I spent all my time drinking prosecco out of a flute celebrating other people’s milestones. Everyone was stoning these miles or milling these stones, and I was stoning nothing.
“They were ticking all these boxes I had no real interest in ticking. I had no drive to get married or have a kid and so I touch on those themes in the beginning of the show, but mostly it’s about marriage, babies, friendships, women and drinking wine.”
I’m not reinventing the wheel [with The Prosecco Expresss], it’s just stuff I like chatting about with the girls.
As well as mastering the art of wine bar nattering in her stand-up, McNally is also well known for being a co-host on the hit podcast My Therapist Ghosted Me with fellow Irish countrywoman Vogue Williams. It’s no surprise the podcast has millions of listeners; it is a side-splittingly funny conversation between a pair of best friends who have tackled everything from celeb feuds and cold sores to Shakira’s tax issues.
“I wanted to keep myself in the industry but in a different way to stand-up,” she explains. “I had a therapist before lockdown who I tried to reach out to, and he stopped taking my calls and ghosted me. The producers at Global loved the name, so we stuck with it,” McNally recalls. “It is such a joy to work with Vogue as we bring different things to the table, so complement each other very well. I’ve always loved that female-on-female connection."
It’s hard not to enter a conversation with Joanne McNally and leave it feeling like you’ve just found yourself a new best friend. She’s one of those effortlessly affable comedians who can dexterously spin any “taboo” topic – from being child-free to experiencing bulimia – into a conversation that laughs its way through the stigma-shuttered darkness. You may not need any convincing, but should you still, why should people board The Prosecco Express?
“I'm biased, but I always walk off stage and come off energised. Wait, do I sound like Kanye West?” McNally pauses before she considers making a beeline for Taylor Swift.
The show is no TED talk; I have no solutions, but what I can promise is one hell of a fun night out with your friends.
Joanne McNally performs at the Athenaeum Theatre from March 30 until April 5. Book tickets to see her on the MICF website here.