Joanne McNally: ‘Cork women get me. I feel seen there’
Joanne McNally in the Everyman Theatre, Cork. Pictures: Miki Barlok
I feel like Joanne McNally is my best friend. I’m not the only one. Women have taken to the comedic star in their droves. She’s the hilarious, slightly chaotic, always honest woman that we all needed over the last two years. She started her tour The Prosecco Express last month and still has 100 dates left to do, most of them, sold out. The tour covers every corner of Ireland and the UK and in March takes her from the Wexford National Opera House to Moscow and back to the INEC in Killarney. It also includes four sold out shows in the London Palladium – that’s 9,200 seats – and a recently announced show in London’s iconic Apollo Theatre in October. That venue holds 3,632 people and has played host to acts like Elton John, Oasis and Kylie. Wow.
When I speak to Joanne, she’s on the road to Cork to do the first of her Everyman shows. She has 10 there altogether and then comes back to do The Marquee in June.
“Cork women get me. I feel seen there,” she tells me.
Before the pandemic hit Joanne was doing well but a combination of Instagram, podcasts and TV appearances have seen her skyrocket to new heights.
“Basically, I did pretty well out of Covid. I just got very lucky. When Covid hit, I was going around gigging and trying to build an audience that way, which is a slower way of doing it. When the lockdown happened, I was like, ‘Right, I’m going to have to pivot’. I mean I didn’t do a full pivot. It’s not like I went back and did nursing, but I was like, ‘Right, I’m going to have to think of something else’.” I started to do podcasts. Who knew?”
The podcasts she mentions are the hilarious Let’s Solve Nothing with Muireann O’Connell and the hugely successful My Therapist Ghosted Me with Vogue Williams. The relationship between Joanne and Vogue, which has included stints living with her and her husband Spencer and the ‘borrowing’ of a lot of clothes is one that her fans love.
“Everything that happened is definitely down to the podcasts. Before lockdown, I was booked in to do two nights in Vicar Street. By the time I came out of lockdown, I was up to 35.
“It’s crazy. I’m so lucky that I’m in a generation of comics who have that resource. In the olden days, ha the old days, all comedians could do was gig. Then they might do the Late Late Show and get a tour out of that, but that was it. TV doesn’t have that power anymore. The power is now in podcasts. TV is losing its power. TV has lost its power I think.” Joanne pauses here and starts to laugh a lot. “This interview is actually to advertise TV, right?” But more of that in a minute.
Her success is down to more than just podcasts though. With almost 200,000 followers on Instagram, Joanne has a tribe of incredibly loyal followers who see themselves in her.
“I’m trying to think about why it’s rolling the way it’s rolling. The women who come to my shows are pretty much exactly like me. It’s kind of like a shared identity or a shared experience or something. It does feel like we know each other. We know each other’s type. Does that make sense?
“You know when meet a woman or a guy and you just know straight away that you’re similar in a way? That’s what it feels like with the girls coming to the shows.
“I think that’s why and I’m invested in them as well. I’m very invested in them. I’m f*cking talking to them on my DMs all day and I don’t even know them.
“They’re like, ‘Saw this and thought of you’, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God hun, saw this and thought of you’. Never f*cking met them. I do wonder about that though. I think back in the day when people were famous, it was because you didn’t know them.
“It was all in the mystery of the unknown and they were unattainable. Whereas now I think to build an audience, they need to know you. Though to be fair, it’s not like that was a strategic move on my part. That’s just what I’m like.
“I am pretty straight up. I’m not trying to be a f*cking arsehole and I’m not trying to make out like I’m perfect, far from it, but I don’t have a lot of boundaries, which is also, as you can imagine, a very large problem in other areas of my life.
“There has to be a line. That’s why I stopped doing birthday videos and stuff. There has to be something that I keep back. I can’t be available all the time. People are sending me DMs at 3am going, ‘Here, can I FaceTime you?’ I was like, ‘Well now, that there is the boundary that I do need’.”
Sharing so much of her life online is great for her career but slightly less great for her love life. She has spoken before about watching male comics having women queue up to meet them after shows, something she says doesn’t happen for female ones and she’s laughed online about lads she may have been talking to on dating apps that disappear into thin air after googling her. I asked her if men are intimidated by funny, frank women.
“I think intimidation is a cop-out. It’s something me and my friends say to each other if someone just doesn’t love us anymore, we’re like, “He’s intimidated,” but we just say it to make ourselves feel better.
“I’d say there are certain situations where it is true. I think even of myself, before I was in comedy I would have thought that male comedians were attractive because there is something powerful about commanding a room like that.
“Whereas I don’t think men look for the same things in a woman that a woman looks for in a man. I’m obviously making a sweeping generalisation here, but I don’t think there’s anything about me or the way I am on stage that a man would think, ‘Oh, that’s cute’.
“I don’t know. Not every man is looking for cute, but I don’t scream, ‘Slip into my DMs’. Do you know what I mean? I just don’t. I scream, ‘Stay out of my DMs’.
“I think it was Spencer (husband to Vogue Williams) who said to me, ‘Your Instagram account, it’s pretty hostile. Your act is pretty hostile.’
“I guess that there’s nothing cute about it and I think sometimes men like a bit of cute. But listen, it just means you just weed out the ones that aren’t right for you then.
“I do feel like I’m at a disadvantage because there’s so much of me out there now. All they have to do if they’re even arsed or bothered, is a quick Google to find out pretty much anything they want. I do feel at a disadvantage because you’re wide open. You’re very exposed. As we all know, you usually just kind of drip-feed your madness, or drip-feed your bad traits. Whereas I’m not in a position to do that anymore because I’m making a living out of my bad traits, so they’re very public.”
When she’s not on the road – which is rare these days – she divides her time between her mam’s house in Dublin and a shared house in London but she’s ready to live alone and settle down a bit.
“I’m going to have to move out of the house. I think there’s a window. I still have quite a student attitude towards my lifestyle because I live out of a bag, you know what I mean? I just don’t want to be going into my 40s in a position where people are accusing me of stealing their hummus in the house. I just need to get out of that vibe, and probably live on my own finally. Get a dog, settle down with myself.
“I’ll stay in London. Before lockdown, I was literally 50/50 in both countries. I was probably more so in Ireland really because the UK stuff hadn’t really taken off. I think I’ll always be floating between the two.”
The move to London didn’t dramatically change her taste in men in the way that she thought it might, in fact it’s had the opposite effect.
“It’s funny, I had this idea that I’d move to London to try and hook up with these kind of flash digital designer guys with fixie bikes and neon caps and stuff. But actually, I gravitate towards Irish lads when I’m the UK.
“It’s so weird. Suddenly, I’m on Tinder looking for lads in GAA jerseys that I would never touch here. I don’t know what it is. You become very nationalistic when you move away. It’s all national anthems and coddle until you get home to Ireland. There’s something familiar about Irish men when you’re away as well. Then when I’m in Ireland, I lose all respect for them basically.”
Not that there’s much time for dating anyway. There’s the mammoth tour, the podcasts, a book for Penguin that’s to be released next year and a second series of Clear History on RTÉ 2 that starts airing on February 17.
“Clear History is a comedy panel show, we did it last year. Kevin McGahern hosts it and he’s the funniest man alive. In the first series it was Colin Murphy and me but then Colin didn’t want to do it this year, so Jason Byrne was stepping in.
“When they asked me I wasn’t sure I was going to do it but I’d never worked with Jason properly and I’ve always been a fan of his, so I said yes. It was so much fun to record. The three of us just laughed, and laughed I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
With a schedule so full, lots of travel and with so many tour dates still ahead of her I wonder if Joanne is exhausted.
“Not yet but speak to me again in about a month. I have the whole of July off. I’m going to Portugal for a month to write my book.” I point out that that’s not actually time off and she laughs.
“I know, yes. I feel like it is, but it’s not. Writing the book is a different muscle though. I feel like it will be less physically taxing. Stand-up is tough going and writing is much more enjoyable. The book isn’t an autobiography or anything. It’s personal essays on life basically. It’s not like, ‘I was born in such and such.’ It’s not one of those, of course it’s not, I’ll never tell anyone when I was born. I was born in none of your f*cking business!”
I let Joanne go, she has a show tonight and one almost every night until May. Not that she finds that daunting in any way, she loves it, you can feel the energy bouncing off her.
May sees the start of the UK leg of the tour and because the venues are bigger there are more breaks between the shows so it’s slightly less taxing.
“The plan is to try and make a dent in the UK market, which I feel I am doing now.”
I laugh and point out that four nights in the Palladium and a night in the Apollo is more than a dent. She laughs at herself.
“No, you’re right, you’re dead f*cking right.”
- Clear History, Series 2, starts Thursday on RTÉ 2
