Holding out for hero Delamere

From prisons to coastal Norway, The Panel comedian has performed his stand-up seemingly everywhere, says Jonathan deBurca Butler.

COMEDIAN Neil Delamare has played strange venues. There was an “interesting” gig in Mountjoy prison, and another in a country that was being terrorised by an Islamist organisation called MILF. Before one concert in a pub on the Ulster border, he shared his dressing room with a man in a coffin. Just last week, the 35-year-old was in Huagesund, on the west coast of Norway.

“I found it odd, but immensely enjoyable,” says the Offaly native. “There’s two types of gig when you go abroad. The ex-pat gig and the people-from-there gig. It was mainly people-from-there. Of course, everyone’s English is amazing, but it has to be really amazing to understand humour and I can guarantee you they’ve never heard Midlands English before. Anyway, there were two drunk Irish guys at it and they were annoying people a bit. There was an English comedian on before me, who was quite polite to them, but I had no such inhibitions. So I went up and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen of Norway, hundreds of years ago you came to our country and raped and pillaged. As revenge for this, every year we send the two biggest pricks we have in Ireland to heckle comedians at your gigs and they’ve outdone themselves tonight’. Big round of applause and that was the end of them”