Deirdre O'Kane on stand up: 'I don’t know how to do it without being personal'
Deirdre O'Kane: “I’m the gauge. If it makes me laugh, that’s it”
“I’m actually not very showbiz.”
I’m being gently rebuffed by Deirdre O’Kane, having told the Drogheda native that, earlier, I’d heard Emma Doran, her podcast co-host, gleefully assert in a radio interview that her colleague in comedy was “very showbiz”.
O’Kane bats away the notion with a hearty chuckle. “I’ve just been in the industry a really long time. So I have a few more stripes. A few more air miles.”
I suggest that, in their podcasts, she comes across as something of a mentor to the younger comic, but that doesn’t fly either.
“I don’t really see it like that. I often think that she’s teaching me. In a way, I absolutely love that there’s an age gap between us” — she’s 56, Doran is 40 — “and that I get to keep up.
“That’s one of the things I love about my job, constantly working with younger ones, because it prevents you from becoming an auld wan.”
There’s no danger of that. O’Kane may be the elder lemon of the podcasting duo, but behind the breezy self-deprecation is a cool confidence and an adaptability that has served her well.
She’s a master at keeping things fresh, with stand-up just one of the strings to her bow.
She’s done film, TV, and theatre acting; a stint on DWTS; voiceovers (she’s one of the Gogglebox Ireland narrators); she’s been a talk-show host; and has an impressive six IFTA nominations (she won in 2015 for Noble).
O’Kane’s longevity in a notoriously tough industry is not down to luck; rather, it’s a testament to her savvy and hard graft. Her segue into stand-up was, however, pure happenstance.
In 1995, she accompanied Stephen Bradley, her then boyfriend, now husband of 25 years, to Kilkenny, where he was directing a documentary about the Cat Laughs comedy festival in its launch year.
At that point, O’Kane been acting for a decade, and live stand-up hadn’t entered her orbit.
“It absolutely was a road-to-Damascus moment. I couldn’t believe this art form that I was looking at. I genuinely thought it was a stream of consciousness and the comedians were geniuses, making it up as they went along. That’s how naive I was.
“There was one comic I really liked, and I went to see him three times” — O’Kane had an access-all-areas pass.
“He didn’t change a word of his set, and that was when the penny dropped. I realised, ‘You’ve just learned this. You’ve written and learned this.’
“And I thought, ‘That’s not hugely different from being an actress. I’m already doing that, standing up in front of people.’ I wasn’t factoring in that you have to write. I’d never written anything in my life.
“But, yeah, I started to write jokes on the way home in the car.”
Aside from a 10-year hiatus from comedy, during which she acted and raised her children, Holly, now 19, and Dan, 15, O’Kane has continued to write jokes, carving out a niche mining her life experiences for laughs.
“I can only write what I know. I don’t know how to do it without being personal.”
Her current stand-up show, , which runs well into 2025, is playing to packed houses, but despite her success, acknowledging her considerable comedic talent hasn’t come easy.
“It took me years to fully appreciate, oh, I’m actually good at this art form. I’m actually taking it seriously. For a long time, I thought of it as a filler.
"Wanting to be an actress was my first choice, and I was wedded to that. It was only in more recent years that I went, ‘Deirdre, you need to cop on. This is where your strength actually lies.’”
Her lack of belief in herself wasn’t a female thing, she says. “It was just my thing. I consider myself to be a late developer. I think I’m slow. I just didn’t get it.”
That self-deprecation again. Her point is well made, though. She didn’t see it — successful Irish female stand-ups were thin on the ground in the 1990s.
“I didn’t see it,” she acknowledges. “Maybe that impacted me.”
For her part, O’Kane is positively impacting the current generation of Irish female stand-ups, who tell her the impression she made on them as youngsters.
“An awful lot of the young ones say to me, ‘I went into it because I saw you on the telly.’” She’s generous with her praise for the “pool of up-and-coming talent” of digital creators now segueing into stand-up. They are, she says, “extraordinary”.
“I call them the covid comics. They were forced to go online. They were forced to create.
O’Kane is unquestionably a name, but her journey to recognition has required resilience.
While her husband was ill (Bradley was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, but has now fully recovered), she continued doing stand-up and then Dancing With The Stars, fully aware that, in a partnership where both are freelancers, it was down to her to keep the show on the road.
They’re a tight team, and have worked together in the past, most recently on , a football mockumentary, which Bradley directed and in which O’Kane stars.
It’s perhaps unsurprising then, when it comes to her comedy, while she’s her own sounding board — “I’m the gauge. If it makes me laugh, that’s it” — she will seek out Bradley’s counsel too.
“I always ask his opinion. I’ll run jokes by him without him even knowing what I’m doing. Or I’ll out-and-out ask him, ‘I need to fix this. Can you help me with this?’ Often, he will come up with a good solution.”
While comedy is now firmly front and centre, O’Kane still enjoys an occasional foray into acting, especially now she’s in the position where she’ll “only do something that really appeals to me on the page. I’m very particular”.
“I really enjoyed being back on set recently. I was back with Chris O’Dowd on his show, , and I was doing a very nice scene with Christina Hendricks from . There’s something lovely about getting to work with somebody of that calibre.
“The other job I’m doing is Lisa McGee’s next project, . She’s written me a very nice part in one of the episodes.”
Fellow stand-up Dara O’Briain once told O’Kane that she gives a lot to her audience, that she exposes herself a lot, and she does. She’s always done it.
In her acting, her stand-up, and her podcasts ( is both Doran’s and O’Kane’s second), she is never less than real and that brand of authenticity is what people seem to crave now.
Proof of the pudding is that has “caught fire”, consistently rating highly in the podcast charts.
A comedy-focused podcast made sense to O’Kane “because that’s what my life is now — I’m on the road and I’m selling comedy”.
Having been a fan of the Tommy, Hector & Laurita podcast, and feeling “very envious because they would have these great big laughs together”, she knew — “I want that, I really want that”.
The vision was crystal clear. O’Kane “desperately wanted [to do a podcast] that I would enjoy myself. I was looking for that person”.
And in Emma, she found her.
The duo click beautifully. Their podcast banter is akin to best pals having a (lively) catch-up in the kitchen over a cuppa.
And, thanks to Powered by Three’s 5G broadband, someone will, literally, be getting the tea firsthand, as part of the No Strings Attached Podcast Tour, which will see livestreamed from a listener’s kitchen.
“Being able to do a show anywhere in Ireland thanks to Three is exciting,” O’Kane says, enthused. “I can’t wait to see their reactions live in their own kitchen.”
It’s innovative and exciting, just as O’Kane is those things and more. She’s put in her 10,000 hours and paid her dues, but it’s in her nature to seek out newness; a new challenge, a new angle.
She’s also frank and honest in a way few celebrities are.
Our conversation has flitted from what it’s like to get stopped by fans (“generally, people are lovely”) to the challenges of sustaining a long-term relationship (“patience and kindness is what it boils down to, really”) and attempting to identify what makes French women so chic. O’Kane thinks it’s confidence. “It’s confidence and deciding, ‘Fuck it, I like who I am.’ That’s the key. We all have to learn that. That’s vital. So I’m going off to work on that now.”
With a wave, she’s gone, before I get the chance to tell her that she doesn’t need to change a thing.
- Three Ireland are giving fans the opportunity to host one of their favourite podcasts live from their kitchen table, powered by Three home broadband.
- The No Strings Attached Podcast Tour includes some of Ireland’s most-renowned podcasts; I’m Grand Mam with PJ Kirby and Kevin Twomey, and Keep It Tight, with Deirdre O’Kane and Emma Doran.
