In this 2023 comedy special, David Nihill humorously navigates the complexities of identity, cultural norms, and immigration. The routine starts with an amusing encounter at an immigration checkpoint, highlighting Nihill’s Irish heritage and the officer’s misplaced connection to it. Nihill then adopts a Latino identity as a comedic device to critique automated customer service systems. He cleverly connects Irish and Latino cultures, drawing parallels in their experiences, particularly around issues like immigration and religion, using humor to highlight these similarities.
Nihill also addresses the evolving perception of Irish immigrants in America, blending history with humor. He reflects on the Irish journey from being a marginalized group to gaining a more celebrated status in American society. His narrative includes witty anecdotes about his family’s history and their unique assimilation into American culture, adding a personal touch to broader discussions on race and identity. Throughout the special, Nihill uses his background as an Irish immigrant in America to offer comedic insights on cultural integration, identity politics, and the immigrant experience.
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[Immigration Officer] Next.
Hey, how’s it going?
Passport. Oh, you’re Irish?
Yeah.
I’m Irish me self.
All right.
My great-grandfather’s dog, Sparky O’Houlihan, came over on the boat 200 years ago.
Oh.
Yeah, it says here you’re a comedian.
Yeah, sometimes.
You’re not gonna make jokes about America, are you?
No, that’d be crazy.
Yeah, not my country. Well, welcome to America, my Irish brother.
(passport stamping)
(audience applauding)
(audience cheering)
Thank you. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you. I am indeed from Dublin, Ireland, but I live in America now so I identify as Latino. (audience laughing) I had to start doing that to get through your automated customer service lines because the other options are no good, are they? Like the minute you call up, they’re like, “Thank you for calling. For English, press one.” I was like, I don’t wanna be English. (audience laughing) My people have been avoiding (resisting?) that option for about 800 years now. What else have you got? You just keep listening. It gets immediately better ’cause they’ll be like, (David speaks Spanish: para español, marque dos) I said, I’m in here and now these are my new people. (audience laughing) Yeah, that’s the beauty of this identify as whatever you feel like culture that we have at the moment. No one can even get mad about that. But I didn’t wanna shock my parents too much ’cause they don’t know they raised a Latino.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, so it is at least logical. Irish people, Latinos already emotionally connected. We both like drinking, dancing, fighting, mostly work in construction. (audience laughing) We are primarily Catholic, we love soccer, speak a whole other language, and have problems with immigration. (audience laughing) (audience applauding) We’re already one people. But it makes my life a bit confusing now because I’m Irish, I’m sarcastically Latino, and I live in America so I have white privilege. Yeah, I never had that in Ireland. (audience laughing) So quietly confident I caught it here. I know, and that’s kind of ironic if you know your history, ’cause you’ll remember the Irish people when we first got here, we didn’t get the most privileged treatment. But that can get forgotten. If you’re treating history like a Netflix series and you just join in season six, you’d be like, well, it’s going great for the Irish, isn’t it?
(audience laughing)
Look at them over there with their shamrock shakes and their parades. (audience laughing) They used to be filth, now they have their own Spring Soap. It’s a real rags-to-riches story. It can get easily forgotten when we first came here, there were signs. They said no Blacks, no dogs, no Irish. I dunno what you did if you were a Black Irish dog walker. (audience laughing) You were not coming in. You actually had no immigration laws in America until one group of people turned up, Irish people, and you’re like, well, we gotta do something about these lunatics. And that’s how all your laws got written into being law, and we love seeing laws and finding a creative workaround. That’s kind of what it means to be Irish partially as well. Like, that’s nice. Doesn’t apply to us. We’ll find a creative and potentially fun way to get around those laws, and we did. We just started shagging all of you. All of you. (audience laughing) That’s why many of you are here tonight. (audience laughing) (audience applauding) We did it indiscriminately, everybody got it. Black, white, pink, Cuban, Asian, Israeli, Palestinian, even English people. (audience laughing) Oh, we would’ve shagged the Queen if we got to her in time. Oh yeah, and with that strategy, we penetrated the very fabric of American society. We got to the point of 23 US presidents claim Irish heritage. And were so lovely when Obama said, I’m Irish, we all went, yeah, feck it. Why not? Go on. (audience laughing) Yeah, like nobody asked to see his birth certificate, you know? (audience laughing) Yeah, who would do that? That would be crazy. We had a picture of him drinking a pint of Guinness and we were like, well that’s good enough for us, Barack. You know, a lot of people were saying Hussein, we read O’Bama clearly. (audience laughing) It’s in the name, isn’t it? Clearly Irish. (audience laughing) We were delighted about the addition of such a cool character. That’s how we are, we’re a very welcoming country. We are so welcoming, we don’t even have a Chinatown. Yeah, we just let them live with us. (audience laughing) That’s a deep statement. Take your time.
(audience laughing)
If this woke society that we have that’s a little bit fake at the moment has rubbed off on you, you’ll be triggered right now. You’ll be like, (American Accent) “oh my God, I’m offended right now. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but I will think about it tomorrow while I’m having a sensible vegan brunch option, and I’ll walk it off. I’ll cover my body in Lululemon merchandise, and I’ll grab my three legged rescue dog Murphy and I’ll just be dragging him along while carrying a four liter indestructible canister of water to stay fully hydrated while I’m listening to Terry Gross on NPR to keep up with issues of diversity, and I will figure out why I’m offended, I will.” (audience laughing) (audience applauding) I am glad you were here staring at me because we emotionally connected on that one, and sometimes people just knew and she’s like, oh, well that one’s clearly a reference to what he’s interpreting as a fragmented and sub divided society in America that likes to call itself a melting pot, but is realistically more of a charcuterie board. (audience laughing) You know, like it has all these wonderful exotic flavors, and then you keep making it worse by adding too many crackers. (audience laughing) (audience applauding) You said it. (audience laughing) It’s a great contrast to Ireland when you think about it because we don’t have, as you rightly nailed on the head there, don’t have a Japan town Korea town, little Italy, Latin Quarter, little Bangladesh, little Armenia, or Chinatown ’cause we’re equally shagging our way into everybody’s family tree. And that’s just brought to you by 23andMe ’cause we are always in your results.
(audience laughing)
We’re always in there. If there’s no Irish in there, that’s a false negative. Just do it again. You know, treat it like an antigen test and just keep doing it until you get the result you’re expecting. There it is. And no matter where you think you’re from. You could be sitting there and you’re like, I’m definitely Black. And we’d be like, “Are you? Are you really?” (audience laughing) 38% of all African Americans have Irish heritage and that list is fantastic, and includes Colin Powell, Alicia Keys, Beyonce, and Shaquille O’Neill. (audience laughing) I don’t know how you missed that one. That’s a huge example. It’s in the name and everything. Irish and African cultures were so intertwined when we both came to America, that we shagged it out so frequently, together, we invented tap dancing. (audience laughing) Yeah, invented horizontally, done vertically. And that was just through the blending of those cultures, isn’t it? That went on to become jazz music. Irish and and Black culture always a bit connected. It goes all the way back to 1845 if not before when Frederick Douglass escaped slavery, became a famous anti abolitionist and said, I’m gonna go around the world and tell them all to be anti-slavery. I’m going to Ireland for four days. Got there and he went, oh they’re fine. They already know. (audience laughing) Yeah, he said Ireland woke as feck.
(audience laughing)
Now I’m paraphrasing. He didn’t really say that. I sarcastically inserted the word woke into his mouth because I mean, that’s become a bit of a fuzzy word these days. We don’t even know what it means. Some people like it, some don’t. I think it boils down to being nice, and Irish people we’ve been knocking that outta the park for a while, and Frederick Douglas, what actually he did say was “this is the first time in my life I’ve been treated as a man and not as a color,” and he stayed for four whole months. So, look at that. Irish people just way ahead of the curve on that one. (audience applauding) We’re pretty good. Just a bit of Black history for you ’cause we love it. You have Black history month here in February, we have it in October. So already there are 10% extra Black history in Ireland. (audience laughing) You went short, we went long. That’s what I’m saying. (audience laughing) At any moment, this show could descend into trivia. It is just ’cause I like trivia, but I never know how to feel about it in America ’cause I watch your news and you have two different versions of the truth. So which trivia am I meant to believe? To find out what’s going on in this country, I have to watch the Irish news.
(audience laughing)
‘Cause I love a good bit of trivia. Like, Irish people famously friendly, yet slightly sneaky. Yeah, we invented or were central to the invention of the tank, the guided missile, and the submarine. Yet the most damage we ever did America is sending you our priests. (audience laughing) (audience howling) See, that really touched some of you.
(audience laughing)
Inappropriately. That’s the power of good trivia, ya know? We are connected to every culture. Many Latinos here tonight? (audience cheering) Ooh, I am surrounded. (David speaks Spanish: Vamos a hacer el show en español) seria mill de veces mejor, y dejar los gringos por afuera See, I really committed to learning that language. I love it. I said well I’m in the second largest Spanish speaking country in the world, and I wanted to commit to that language because I didn’t wanna get caught out by some Karen in Whole Foods one day. (audience laughing) You know, they’ll get you, she’ll be like, (American accent) “Oh my God, I saw your little skits online where you identify as a minority group that you are clearly not part of.” And I’ll be like, (Speaking Spanish) Karen, hjpta, . que largse hasta alla (audience laughing) (audience applauding) Oh, that would be very enjoyable, wouldn’t it? You just see her scurrying off to the Tesla to avoid a racial hate storm, and there’s nothing but a trail of confusion and goji berries behind her. When Irish people first came to America and we were like, hello, help us starving refugees. America’s like, all right, but you gotta fight in our war against Mexico. Well, that doesn’t sound like a great plan. Have you got any other programs for the refugees? (audience laughing) Because America always has a program for something, but no they didn’t and we ended up fighting against Mexicans and we were down there and we’re like, jaysus, we like these people. I don’t know why we’re fighting against them at all. We have a lot in common, they’re great fun. And then we saw the deal breaker, Latinas, we’re changing sides. (audience laughing) Yeah, we saw, we were conquered, and we came.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
We did, we genuinely changed sides. We became the first country in European history to fight on behalf of Mexico. And that is the longest, yet most historically accurate way to say we also shagged our way into Mexico. (audience laughing) If you know your history of that group, they’re called the San Patricios. There’s a lot of cool things named after them to honor that connection between the two places. There’s a guy called William Langford from Wexford. Most people know him as Zorro. You didn’t know that Zorro was a sneaky Irish dude. The legend of Zorro based on a mildly illegal masked immigrant riding around doing nice things ahead of his time, and he was a skilled swordsman with a blatant disrespect for authority. Definitely Irish. Definitely. (audience applauding) Definitely, and we left a bit more modern evidence. You just go on Google images and you type boxing, and then you add the word Canelo. (audience laughing) And just have a look what comes back at you because you’re gonna see a world and Mexican boxing champion that’s suspiciously red haired. (audience laughing) Pasty white skin covered in freckles and his real name is Barrigan, an Irish name. So if someone could get that man of 23andMe result, we can claim another true champion. (audience laughing) We are connected, those cultures. Do you know where they differ a little bit from Latin people to an Irish people? Latin people are not as sneaky as Irish people. Like, you don’t even… In Spanish, do you know the word for sneaky? Where are me Latinos at?
[Audience Member] Picaro.
Picaro, they’re not agreeing with that over here. I heard an audible no over here. “sospechosa”. Not really, doesn’t translate. Isn’t this amazing? That’s the diversity we have in Chicago these days where an Irish person is confusing Latinos with their own language. (audience laughing) It’s a bit of a sneaky trivia one because there’s loads of slang words, but there’s no direct translation from English Spanish to the word sneaky. And yeah, it’s fantastically ironic ’cause if you’re Mexican and you’re kinda known for sneaking over the border.
(audience laughing)
And there’s no word for the thing that you’re doing. (audience laughing) I mean, are you just walking over an arbitrary line in the ground to, you know, visit your family or pick a few strawberries or maybe celebrate Cinco de Mayo? A festival created for you. And Americans are like, Hey man, you snuck in there. You’re like listen, that’s the past tense and irregular verb that I don’t have. (audience laughing) I’m just gonna keep walking until someone buys me a flight to Martha’s Vineyard. (audience laughing) Oh, that was sneaky. I’m just delighted to be here. America one of the most positive places in the world you could ever be based anywhere, and just the opportunity just to talk to people like do this is fantastic ’cause we were without it for a while, and I always didn’t get to do it. When I actually first moved to America, the job I had I came on a diplomatic visa, and one of the first tasks they gave me was organizing the Irish president’s visit to Seattle and Vancouver, which was a huge mistake by someone in a position of authority.
(audience laughing)
They just overlooked all the red flags you’re seeing here this evening. And there was a guest list to do and they’re like, who’s doing the guest list now? They’re like, you are. And I was like unsupervised. I invited everyone I ever met. I was like. (audience laughing) I was in Seattle and me uncle lived there. He’d moved from Ireland years ago and I forgot he’s so big, he’s 6’5 that he grew up, when he was 17 years old, he drove a mini Cooper from the back. (audience laughing) And he just removed the front seats for extra leg room. So he’s pretty sizable. You’re not gonna miss him, and he got so emotional during the president’s speech and my boss had told me, only C-suite level executives or above. And he worked in the logging industry and I went, well, close enough. (audience laughing) Gotta invite him, can’t miss out on this one. And he got so emotional during the speech he decided to rush the stage that he wanted to hug the president. Yeah, I dunno if you’ve ever watched your career changed live.
(audience laughing)
It was him moving towards him, oh no. And the Secret Service were there, but they were on low alert because Irish people, we never did it. (audience laughing) It’s a fairly unique group of white people in history where you’re like, well what did they do? We’re like nothing. We’re good actually. And you might correctly say, well, didn’t you blow up some British people? And we’ll be like, yeah, but historically, who hasn’t wanted to do that? (audience laughing) (audience applauding) You can’t even invite those fellas to a tea party, can you? But no, we did make one bit of a fauxpas. When Hitler died, only one country sent condolences. Yeah, Ireland.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, how bad does the prospect of continued British rule have to be that we’re like, well, we better hedge our bets on this one. Somebody send them some flowers and tell ’em we loved his painting. Get ’em over there. But normally, we haven’t done it, whatever it is. And that applied here because they were on low alert. My uncle is moving rapidly towards the podium completely unobstructed. He gets there, grabs the president in a kind of a bear hug and he’s so big she just disappears into his body. My boss elbows me in the ribs and is like, “David, who the feck is that?” I said, “I have no idea.”
(audience laughing)
And at that moment he kinda leaned forward and was like, “David, get the camera. Get a picture.” Yeah, and that’s why I do comedy now.
(audience laughing)
I never planned on it. America, I blame Americans. It’s just too supportive with stuff. You can have the worst plan over here and Americans like, “you should try that. That could be a great journey for you. I’d love to see that.” And, you know, you do get the feeling when you move to America that anything’s possible and I got talking to this girl drunk as a monkey on St. Patrick’s Day, and she was kind of waddling towards me in a green shirt and it was made by Bed Bath and Beyond of all places. So pretty classy stuff we’re talking here, and it was a bit controversial. They genuinely were making these because it said on it, everybody loves a drunken Irish slut. That is not true. (audience laughing) Not even Irishmen love drunken Irish sluts. (audience laughing) That’s why we’re here. (audience laughing) For your drunken American ladies. And if we get lucky, maybe we’ll end up in your Bed Bath and Beyond.
(audience laughing)
But this one, drunk as a monkey, and it was that classic American conversation starter that scares foreigners. Like, what do you do? What’s your job? What do you do? I’m like, all right, take it easy, drunken lady. I didn’t really wanna tell her. So I was like, you know the Antarctic where it’s cold and is ice and snow everywhere? And she’s like, yeah. And I was like, “Because it’s ice and snow everywhere, it can be slippery and they have penguins walking around, loads of penguins. And I was like, sometimes ’cause it’s slippery, the little penguins, well, they fall over. I stand them back up again.” (audience laughing) I didn’t think she was gonna believe that one. I gotta tell you it was a magical moment when she called her friend. She’s like, “Oh my god, Megan, you’re not gonna believe. (audience laughing) The Irish guy, he’s a penguin stander upper.”
(audience laughing)
I was like, wow, anything is possible in this country. (audience laughing) But everything is accumulation of factors. I had time after that, a friend of mine tragically suffered a spinal cord injury and all his American friends were rallying around to do fundraisers for him to get him back on his feet. And they kind of rubbed off on me and I was like, oh, I wanna get involved here. What can I do? And they’re like, oh, could you host an event for us? You love talking, you’re always talking. I’m like, no, no, this was long before I’d ever did comedy. I was like, I’m afraid of public speaking. Actually most Irish people hate it, I’m no different. I hate public speaking. For me, it’s actually a crippling fear. And he said, I’m in a wheelchair, you dildo. (audience laughing) I was like, you’re right there. You have a fair point. It’s not a crippling fear. I’m gonna have to try and get over this. That is a terrible phrase. And so I started trying to do it and I started doing comedy. We ended up doing a fundraiser, we kept it going for years, and I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole of trying to raise money for people with spinal cord injuries because of our friend who was affected by it. And I was trying to be all business cool, you know, from what I learned with the government sending emails, you write kind regards all the time, don’t you? Like some days you’re being lazy and you’re like, I don’t need to be kind today. Just regards kind of a day.
(audience laughing)
Unfortunately, I’m dyslexic and every time I wrote the word regards, I put a T instead of a G. Some of you way better at spelling than I am, and I was not writing regards anymore. It was re, all right, but it was not regards. And sometimes I just dropped kind and went re not-gards to people with spinal cord injuries for two whole years. Nobody brought this to my attention in two year period. And now we live in a society where they’re like, that word’s not acceptable anymore. And I’m like, I fully agree. The only problem is I have documented evidence that I used this word. (audience laughing) I wanted just a hole to open in the ground and just disappear into it and I was like, I’m never making a mistake like this again. ‘Cause when you’re dyslexic you make a lot of them, and I was like, I can’t make one again. And a friend of mine sent me a message. He said, I know you’re thinking about moving to Los Angeles. Do you want to try out apartment here for a month totally for free, blah, blah, blah, something about a cat. And yeah, I’d lived in America long enough to know that free is my price point. (audience laughing) I didn’t need to read anymore, and that was a bit of an error of judgment because my companion in his apartment was Doug the psychopathic cat, and Doug had some interesting hobbies. His main one was pouncing from the darkness and stabbing me.
(audience laughing)
Oh, he loved a bit of stabbing. Any exposed piece of skin was fair game. He was just drawn to exposed skin, and I’d even give him a bit of neck and he just out the corner. What the hell’s this cat hanging there like Alex Honnold just hanging off a cliff face. Free Soloing off my ear lobes. I was like, this can’t get any worse, and then it did ’cause I got COVID about four weeks before it was fashionable. And because your US medical system is so crap, I had no idea what was going on with me, and I’ve lived in America long enough that I know you guys are great at turning a negative into a positive. So I always try and put the positive on something, and it is with the medical system. It’s equally one of the only countries in the whole world that you can just go online and diagnose yourself and prescribe yourself medical marijuana for fairly questionable medical reasons. (audience laughing) And you can get that delivered to you by a socially awkward person on or in an electrical vehicle, and then you just add Chunky Monkey ice cream and you’re like, whoo, I am better already.
(audience laughing)
I don’t even remember what was wrong with me in the first place, and that was the treatment I was doing with myself. And I was there locked with this cat, and unfortunately, the bathroom was separated from the bedroom by a hallway. So to get to the toilet, I had to run the gauntlet of Doug the psychopath. Yeah, and I dunno, now obviously diarrhea, it’s disgusting and who wants to talk about bodily functions ever. But it was a bit of a part of COVID now, and you’ll know if you really need to go and you haven’t got control, the preparation for going does not happen when you get to the actual bathroom. The minute you hear something funky, you’re running and you’re already dropping the pants. I was outta the door and I was in preparation mode, and that was a huge error of judgment. I was like, how can I make diarrhea and COVID worse? I’m just gonna add a short-haired tabby hanging off my private parts like a furry kettlebell dragging along behind me. I didn’t think it could get any worse, and the only respite I got from Doug was to barricade myself in the bedroom into what i thought was safety. But I forgot the little nut job used to love eyeing up the little quarter inch gap under the door, and I grew up with cats. I never had a cat do this. He’d just lie on his back and he’d just slide in under like a mechanic going in underneath a car, and he’d extend his little psychopath paws in under the door and just start playing an imaginary air piano just all night long doing his best Stevie Wonder impression from the darkness. I didn’t see his cat size claws for 14 days. I didn’t even know quarantine was a thing, but that was my quarantine. I finally escaped from that into the month of March (2020), and that was the first march in history that Corona Trumped Guinness.
(audience laughing)
Irish people did not see that one coming along with a lot of the rest of the world, but now I had a bit more time on my hands than was expected ’cause I couldn’t hang around with you lovely people. So I said, you know what? I’ve been hearing about Game of Thrones for ages, and I have all this medical marijuana for non-medical reasons. I’m just gonna combine the few of these and just see how it goes for awhile. And I was so stoned watching Game of Thrones that I started making correlations that clearly are not reality. (audience laughing) I decided Jon Snow, the main character, was the history of the Irish in America. (audience laughing) I dunno how I’m the only one seeing this, but every episode he’s talking about the weather. Every episode. Winter is always coming for Jon over there. At the start, everybody thought he was a bastard, didn’t they? And then they didn’t like him at all and they forced him to defend the walls that he had nothing to do with building, and fight against people that he had no beef with whatsoever. Sound familiar, Latinos? And they’d point out groups to him and say, Jon there the Wildlings over there. We don’t like that group of people and he’d be like, “Ah, I kinda like ’em. I specifically like that red-haired one over there.”
(audience laughing)
He had shagged her within a couple of episodes in a cave. And in doing so, united those groups of previously fighting people, and it’s just from shagging. And then of he went south and they said, Jon, we don’t like that group here either. They’re the Targarians. And he said, well same thing again for me, I kinda like one of them. There’s a good looking one over there. And they’re like, Jon, she’s so feisty. She has a fire breathing dragon. That’s pretty Latina when you think about it. And then he shagged her, didn’t he? And he united those tribes, and then they dug up more information. They said, Jon, we’re starting to like you. We did some research. One little thing, you’re not a bastard anymore. We know who your family is. You’re currently shagging your auntie. Yeah, you might wanna stop that. And he’s like, no, I gotta unite the tribes. I’ll keep going. And he did, and he brought ’em all together and now they’re all together. They love him so much that they decided we gotta make Jon the king, and in the end they gave him back the one thing he always wanted the most, the North, which is pretty representative of the Irish issue when you think about it.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
You might be rightly asking, how long did he waste of his life to come up with that one? And that was 70 hours and 14 minutes. Oh man, and then when I ran out TV, I ended up like a lot of the world, you do a bit of scrolling on TikTok. It just came out and you’re like, ooh, what can I find here? And I was delighted I did because I found this beautiful 21 year old Black girl from Virginia called Morgan Bullock, and she was doing Irish dancing to Megan Thee Stallion music. The greatest thing I’ve ever seen. That’s our national dance, but with natural rhythm. (audience laughing) We’ve been missing that for a while. And somehow we got famous, despite the obvious handicaps for natural rhythm for dancing. We commercialized it, we created a show called “Riverdance,” sold out to 25 million people around the world despite only moving from the waist down in an in and out gyrating shagging motion. And then you’re shocked when we end up in your 23andMe results. I thought this dancing is fantastic. Let me enter the chat and just have a look and read the comments. It must be very nice. And all of a sudden it wasn’t. And they all said the same thing. “Oh my god, that’s cultural appropriation.” Yeah, some Becky in Berkeley, California who couldn’t get an acai bowl for breakfast that morning, and was angry at the internet about who knows what on behalf of a country that she wasn’t from. There was a lot of them. All the comments came from one particular country. You might know it ’cause we’re here now. (audience laughing) None of them were from Ireland because we know that you cannot appropriate Irish culture. You can appropriate other cultures, but not Irish culture. It’s impossible. 35 million Americans claim Irish heritage. Between 50 and 80 million people around the world identify as Irish. That means we’re the largest per capita diaspora in the whole world, and we only have 5 million people in Ireland.
(audience laughing)
You Americans, you love joking about an Irish goodbye and an Irish exit. Clearly, we’re not pulling out. (audience laughing) (audience applauding) We are in there ’til the end. But there was all these negative comments all of a sudden all from the same thing. Now luckily, entered the chat, the half Indian gay leader of Ireland. Because while you’re talking about diversity, we’ve been living the brand and, you know, stereotypes are a bit of a thing sometimes. So when I say over here we had half Indian gay leader of Ireland, they’d be like, “oh my god, you had an affluent Indian man in charge of your country? I bet he was a doctor. Those people are always doctors.” I’m like, yeah, he was a doctor, and his dad was a doctor, and it was a pretty good time to double down on doctors during a global pandemic. In contrast to your rather interesting leadership choices.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
I mean, I don’t wanna cite probability, but one of those leaders way less likely to grab you by the pssy, you know? (audience laughing) I’m pretty sure that was our half Indian gay dude. They’d be like, go on grab her by it. No, no, no. Good, you’re in charge now. (audience laughing) ‘Cause if you wanna shut up a bunch of predominantly white people getting angry about cultural appropriation, which we know can’t be done against Ireland, and you wanna silence them, there’s nothing more effective than a brown faced gay dude who’s the leader of a predominantly white country in the past to enter the chat and say, shut the feck up. (audience laughing) (audience applauding) That’s… I’m paraphrasing there. He wanted to keep his job so he said it in a nicer way. He said, “Morgan, well done. We love your dancing so much so you should come over for St. Patrick’s Day to Ireland and dance.” And she said yes, and this young girl flew over to Ireland and they did a radio interview with her, and unknown to anyone, they had a surprise caller during that interview. And the guy called in, he said, “Hey Morgan, head of “Riverdance” here. We’d love you to be the first Black dancer in the 25 year history of “Riverdance. What do you say?” And she said, yes. The best part of that story by a mile is that her first ever show in America as a Black Irish Riverdancer was in Salt Lake City, Utah. (audience laughing) Was right there Under the Banner of Heaven. (audience laughing) We had a young Black American lady helping to shag our way into the very fabric of Mormon society and God, that is Cultural Appreciation, isn’t it? Which is a much better term.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
It’s a good one. (audience applauding) A really cool story though, and if you get a chance to see her doing Riverdance, she’s on tour the moment. Go see it. But I was at a stage where I was like, you know, I was wasting my life basically. I watched “Game of Thrones,” now I’m TikTok scrolling away, I survived Doug the cat, but I’m not doing any productive. And a friend of mine’s like, “Would you not take some of your little comedy videos and throw them on the internet? Sure no one’s gonna see them anyway.” Yeah, that worked out a bit better than I thought, to be honest. ‘Cause my negative Irish self, and that is our natural demeanor, I was like, this is not gonna, what a waste of time. I hate social media to be honest. I never had any public social media really with any effort until two and a half years ago, and it took Americans to show me the positive of something I always thought was negative. And I was very glad you did because I got into a bit of trouble a few months after I started doing it. And I said something in Pittsburgh, that I don’t believe to be controversial at all. I said, and you might have heard me saying it, Irish people have no white guilt. None, and it’s due to a revolutionary strategy we had where we had potatoes in the ground and we all went, feck it, let’s pick ’em ourselves.
(audience laughing)
Over here. You, over here. Yeah, I’m not explaining that joke again, okay?
(audience laughing)
Yeah, if you don’t get that joke, you are the problem. (audience laughing) (audience applauding) But I was in the hotel that night after the show and I was heavily medicated for non-medical reasons, and I was eating ice cream in bed. I had a pot of Chunky Monkey and I had no challenges in the world at that moment outside of hand-eye coordination ’cause oh, I was so stoned I couldn’t get the spoon to my mouth anymore, and I could find the little lumps of fudge but I was basically flicking them over my shoulder. And chunk by chunk, I was turning the hotel room into a crime scene, and I just I was basically snorting fudge at one moment ’cause I just gave up on the spoon and I was like, I’m going in here. I’m like a horse into a feed bag of ice cream. And I dunno if you’ve ever been that messed up late at night and thought to yourself, you know what? This is a fantastic time for me to check my work email.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, I was like, oh I’m in tiptop condition right now. Let me just get a jumpstart on the working week right now. Oh, I was just lying stoned out my face with the little light, you know, on your face in the darkness with me fudge covered fingers scrolling away. And I was lucky I did because this message I saw kinda shocked me into a bit of sobriety. And it said, “You might be in a bit of trouble. Somebody badly misinterpreted something you said tonight. Click this link.” And it was a link to a TikTok video and I clicked it and the cover of the video said, Racist Irish comedian jokes about cotton picking. I said, well that’s definitely me. (audience laughing) Yeah, I looked at the view count. There was a hundred thousand views on this video. It’d only be up a couple of hours, and it was over 400 comments and they were all saying the same thing. Who is the racist? Where’s the racist? Where can we find him? I was so stoned, I entered the chat. (audience laughing) I said, I know where he is. He’s in a hotel room right now covered in ice cream. He had no idea he was a racist. This is a huge moment in his life right now, and it’s a big discovery. And to make things worse, he’s right now covered in an involuntary ice cream brown face.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, oh, I was just sitting there like a Canadian prime minister. (audience laughing) It was a PR disaster waiting to happen, and in a moment of clarity, I was like well geez, what am I gonna do? I nearly laid an egg, I’d never been that nervous in my life, and I was like, ooh, I have a little video from tonight actually. I can post what I actually said and feck it, I’m going to sleep and when I wake up tomorrow, it’ll be interesting at least. (audience laughing) And I know that doesn’t sound like a good strategy, and it wasn’t but I got a bit lucky I didn’t know with social media ’cause I’m such an idiot with it that when strangers write to you as a stranger, they don’t expect you to write back. Yeah, they’d be writing to me. “Hello, David’s team.” And I’m like, team? This fella can’t even work a spoon. There is no team. I am the I in this team. Like, there’s no way it’s you writing back. I’m like, no, those regards are all for you. I just…
(audience laughing)
Yeah, I just can’t spell. I didn’t mean it, but that’s a mark of authenticity. Just give ’em a love heart to try and make up for it. And so I didn’t know you’re not meant to write back. I’ve been writing back, I’ve been treating strangers like pen pals for about two and a half years. So you’re like, well you should come to Chicago and do a show and I’ll be like, yeah, well and here I am. That’s kind of how that works. (audience applauding) Hey, thanks. Well, thank you very much. I didn’t know there was any other way, but I guess because it was during lockdown and everything when it started, I guess it built up a little bit of goodwill. And when I was so heavily medicated that I couldn’t use words to defend myself, which is the one thing I meant to be okay at, given my current occupation, all these people started arguing on my behalf. When I woke up in the morning, they’d won.
(audience laughing)
Yeah.
(audience applauding)
This lady had fully retracted her statement, deleted the video, and made a public apology. And I was like, wow, that’s the world we really should live in, that I could go to bed totally racist and wake up totally cured. Like it never happened. So if you were one of those people that kicked into action on my behalf, thank you very much. I really needed you. That’s the core part of looking at everything positive I suppose, ’cause Americans, you are genuinely some of the happiest people in the world. You really are and you should be because you’re taking two thirds of the world’s antidepressants. (audience laughing) Yeah, you’re just going around with the Adderall fueled spirit of Ted Lasso running through your veins. Yeah, it really brings out your inner Trader Joe’s worker.
(audience laughing)
We’re not like that in Ireland. Ironically, my last name is Nihill, and that’s my real name as in nihilism, which among many other things means extreme pessimism. And I got that name from my dad and it’s ironic ’cause he is the most positive person I think I’ve ever met. Nothing gets him down, and a few years back he got diagnosed with cancer and on receipt of the diagnosis from the doctor, he looked so upbeat that the doctor was taken back and he’s like, “Mr. Nihill, I don’t think you realize the severity of the problem you have.” And my dad said, “I don’t have a problem. I just gave it to you.”
(audience laughing)
It was a pretty good strategy. He didn’t worry about it at all and a few years later, no more cancer anymore. Never came back to this day. I don’t think he ever worried about it for a minute. (audience laughing) That was great. Thank you. (audience applauding) He got a thing a wee bit later that many of our families are affected by sometimes and some of yours might be here tonight. Macular degenerative disease where your eyesight begins to rapidly deteriorate. He didn’t let it stop him at all. He’s like, “David, I’m off to renew me driver’s license.” (audience laughing) I dunno if that’s a great plan. And one thing played to his advantage that always happens to us as Irish people when we move to America. You get a really warm reception here, which is fantastic and American’s normally take a minute or two but you always know it’s coming where they’re like, “Oh my God, you’re Irish? Do you know my friend Brian Murphy?
(audience laughing)
He’s also Irish.” We’re like oh, I cannot wait to not know Brian Murphy. (audience laughing) It happened me with a guy called Dave Ryan in San Francisco. My friends were like, “Oh my God you’re from Dublin? My buddy Dave Ryan’s from Dublin. You guys are gonna know each other for sure.” And I’m like, dude, it’s 1.5 million people in Dublin. It’s statistically improbable. Then I met him and I was like, “Oh feck, Dave. I haven’t seen you in ages.” (audience laughing) To make it even more stereotypical, we worked in the same bar together in Ireland.
(audience laughing)
And his cousins live next to my auntie and uncle in a rural field in the middle of nowhere. There’s like 20 houses, and they just happened to live next door to each other. And it kind of played to my dad’s advantage a bit, the small world nature of Ireland ’cause when he went to renew the driver’s license, he walked in and he was all nervous and straight away the guy’s like, “Oh, Pat Nihill, haven’t seen you in years.” And oh he’s like, “What are you here for?” Oh, to renew it, and how’s your eyesight? My dad said, “It’s not great, to be honest.” And the man went, “Well, I tell you Pat, would you you see a bus if it drove past you?” (audience laughing) Yeah, my dad went, “Oh feck yeah, definitely.” And he went, “Good man, Pat. Three more years. Go on.
(audience applauding)
On your way.”
(audience applauding)
I dunno where he drove to, but he drove somewhere. A week later, God love him, he entered a golf competition. He loves golf and he entered a golf competition against people who could actually see their balls. (audience laughing) Yeah, and at one moment he pulled back the club and he went to hit the ball with all his force, and it exploded because it was a mushroom.
(audience laughing)
He wasn’t deterred by this whatsoever. He actually came second in that competition. (audience laughing) It was his highest finish in 15 years. And he was so excited about the whole confusion mushroom incident that he grabbed his 82 year old giggling friend and went back the next day to recreate the moment on video. He literally just voluntarily blew up a mushroom all over his own nut bag, and his friend videoed it and they did giggled like teenagers and then emailed it to me and went, “David, will this go viral on TikTok or what?” (audience laughing) Legend. He loved golf but I went, you know, golf is obviously hugely popular in Ireland. I got forced into some of the more extreme sports when I started traveling around the world, especially here in America. They love just doing unnecessary outdoor crazy stuff and I said, well I’ll try that. I started off with wakeboarding. Have you ever done that? It’s where they drag you behind the back of a boat like a modern day Red Bull sponsored extreme Jesus, and they waste as much gasoline as humanly possible. Yeah, it would’ve been fun, I suspect, but I didn’t really get to fully live it at the time initially because you’re just meant to pop up outta the water and slide across the top of the water. That’s it. I didn’t pop up at all. I just got dragged underwater like a leaky human submarine. It was dragging me around in figures of eight underwater with just water going in one hole and out the other. Yeah, it was like a high speed clonic irrigation, and I tell you wakeboarding one thing to know if you don’t stand up, it quickly becomes waterboarding. Yeah, Americans are great at that as well.
(audience applauding)
Not your fault. Spanish invented it, you perfected it, we never did it. That’s just a trivia cycle to that one. But I was so bad at wakeboarding that I jumped off the back of the boat at one moment, looked at my knee and part of it was missing, and it was all blood in the water and it was around the time in that flesh eating bacteria. Do you remember that was a thing in America and around the world before we moved onto COVID and forgot that flesh eating bacteria was a thing? Yeah, and they thought I might lose my knee and I ended up in hospital. My leg grew swelled so big it just kept bigger and bigger, and they start pumping you full of Vancomycin. And if you know anything about your drugs in America, you’ll know Vancomycin is the drug of last resort. When they give you this, the medical system basically saying eh, we don’t know. It’s a bit like the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
It’s like go on, take this, keep us posted. Maybe mix it with something down the road. And I say that as someone who took the Johnson and Johnson vaccine in Miami in Spanish ’cause we’re pretty sneaky, and that was the only way I could get it at that time. But I ended up, I was pretty compromised in hospital and they wouldn’t let me out unless I had full-time medical care, which when you combine comedy and your insurance system, well, that was not gonna work out well. My mother had been a nurse her whole life and I couldn’t think of anyone better to ask to look after me. The only problem was she hadn’t traveled in like 20 years. I had to call her from San Francisco back to Ireland, and I was like ma’am, I really need you. Any chance you’d come over? And she’s like, “Absolutely, David, I’ll be over. Now I don’t know anything about flights or the internet or any of that carry on. I haven’t really been anywhere in about 20 years, but feck it, I’ll get back to you. I’ll figure it out. Don’t you worry about a thing.” Yeah, didn’t hear from her until the next day. She’s like, “David, I went to the bank. I met a beautiful Brazilian girl down there. She knew about the internet. Have the tickets. I’ll be over tomorrow. Thank God for the immigrants, huh?”
(audience laughing)
I don’t know if you know, nice little bit of trivia that Brazilian Portuguese is actually the fourth most spoken language in Ireland at the moment. Rapidly moving towards third most spoken language, and it’s kind of a very reflective immigration policy we had where we looked at ourselves in the mirror and we went, well Jaysus, we get sunburn pretty easily, don’t we? And we have no natural rhythm and, you know, we’re not exactly sexual icons and we haven’t qualified for the World Cup of football (soccer-yuk) in years. Brazilians, yes, yes, Brazilians. (audience applauding) How many is too many? Never. Keep it going. We’ve got loads of room. We used to have 8 million people in Ireland. We don’t even have five point something million now. So that’s room for a lot of Brazilians if you need them. And I’m totally fine with that, but I was very grateful of it. Me ma’am basically arrived the next day and it was funny ’cause it’s Irish people we take so long to get used to the rules in America. Like when we move here as foreigners you have to adjust to Americans’ love of the rules. You love the rules. We have ’em in all our countries, but they’re guidelines.
(audience laughing)
You know, you apply logic and you go your own way, and you can really see love of the rules if you participate or watch any American sport. You love it, the commentary is 90% about the rules, and the rest of the time is just whatever the athletes tend to be doing. I was watching the World Cup and they’re like here, “What have we got going on here, Ryan? Well, there was a foul in the box. It’s gonna be a PK. And what’s a PK for the viewers at home? A PK is a violation inside the box.” And for the rest of us in the world, Piqué is a Spanish player who used to shag Shakira, and then he strayed outside the box and that was a huge violation. (audience laughing) Confusing. But I didn’t know any of these rules until Americans dragged me mountain biking, and it will happen you. If you live in one of your predominantly white areas in America, four guys called Chad, Chip, Ryan, Carl, it’s normally a kind of four letter fraternity name, will turn up outside your house at about 8:00 AM on a Saturday morning while you’re trying to be hungover, masturbate, procreate, anything more productive than what they want you to do. They’ve got bicycles that are worth more than your car, and potentially house, and you can’t just join them. You have to first eat Goo packets and Clif Bars to sustain a false sense of sugar fueled enthusiasm to commute unnecessarily to a place you don’t need to be to do a thing you don’t need to do all while dressed as a ballerina. Very confusing. (audience laughing) Very confusing. I didn’t know it was called single track mountain biking and it’s where there’s only room for one mountain bike, and I didn’t know that Americans decided the person coming up the hill has the right of way. I didn’t know that, I was coming down the hill at speed. I was having a great time. I was like a dog hanging out of a car window. I was really enjoying it to be honest, and I was quietly confident the rules were on my side ’cause I was using gravity.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, technically a law for the Isaac Newton fans in the room. And the guy coming towards me, he thought the rules were gonna save him and that’s a classic American mistake right there. (audience laughing) Oh, you guys make it all the time. You’ll take some dude called Billy Ray in Alabama, and you’ll be like, “hey, that’s Billy Ray. He left high school at 11 years old, never actually read a book in his life, Billy Ray. Look at him there, he’s got his dungarees on backwards. He’s been surviving on nothing but Coors light and corn syrup. Billy Ray, would you like a firearm, huh?” (audience laughing) “It’ll be fine. He’s gonna follow the rules, aren’t you Billy Ray? Oh, yeah.” That’s not gonna work out for anybody. That’s what’s playing out here, but it’s just in mountain biking terms because it’s classic power versus authority. The only problem is authority only goes one way, downhill. You can’t use authority on your boss. It only goes one way. I’m coming down the hill, I have all the power, I am an idiot and a liability, but I have all the power simply because I have an outta control lump of steel supposedly under my control. And that is pretty representative of American society right there sometimes. (audience applauding) You can see it coming. This is no happy ending in that moment, and there wasn’t. And I knew this guy was American coming towards me ’cause he looked way too happy. (audience laughing) Oh, he was just an explosion of enthusiasm. It was like somebody combined 4-Hour Energy, Red Bull, and Viagra and gave it to a life coach on their birthday.
(audience laughing)
I couldn’t tell you what exactly what was going on in his mind, but if I had to guess it’d be like, “oh my God, I’m having the perfect day right now. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. I’ve never maintained such a speed at such an elevation game before. I could even be in a flow state right now. This could be a personal best for me. I can’t wait to get home and share it with my online community on Strava.” (audience laughing) Oh, I just crashed right into this fella, I took all the happiness off his face, and I could feel the Goo packets exploding on impact, and the peanut butter Clif Bars flying through the air. Oh, I smashed him. I took all the happiness off his face, and I hit him so hard, the two bikes got intertwined and my hand went through the crossbar and got locked there covered in blood stuck on his lycra clad testy satchel. His little Lululemon nut bag was in my hand. And I dunno if you’ve ever got your hand stuck somewhere, but you rock it. That is the technique. You always rock it. Oh, now I was arousing all the wrong forms of suspicion, and I went for an extra bit of leverage. Huge error of judgment. The excitement in his face only multiplied and I was like, Jaysus, now we’re more than strangers on a trail. How did I get into this? This is gonna be a negative online review somewhere. And it was real awkward ’cause we ended up just locked in this Mexican standoff, which is ironic. Mexicans smart enough not to be mountain biking in the first place. And I finally yanked me hand outta there, and we end up staring each other and he could have said anything. And there’s a moment of silence and he’s like, “Do you not know the rules?”
(audience laughing)
I was like, “Listen Carl, the rules are not gonna save you in this situation.” Okay, I shouldn’t even have a mountain bike. Billy Ray definitely shouldn’t have a firearm. So yeah, if you can get my hand off your nut sack, we can get out there, use logic, and make your country great again. (audience laughing) (audience applauding) Yeah, that’s why I don’t do mountain biking anymore. But that was a bit of a long way to say, Americans love the rules. My mom shattered them the minute she came, she wasn’t even in America an hour and a half and they got to the hospital or she got to the hospital and was like, visiting hours are over. Feck they are, my son is in there. Straight in, no regard for visiting hours whatsoever, and we ended up all of a sudden in very close proximity ’cause they let me out only if she’d look after me, and we’re sitting in my house and we haven’t really lived around each other in a place different from my home in Ireland for years. Never been around that close, and and outta nowhere when she finally got comfortable after a few days, she was like, “David, do you have any of those cannabis cookies?”
(audience laughing)
I was like, “I do, I have loads of them actually.” And I fed her two, which was twice the recommended dosage and a grave error of judgment for getting your mother stoned for her first edible experience at 74 years old. And I know the problem was this was before COVID, so I wasn’t a weed professional yet because to be honest, I don’t like drugs. I’ve never liked drugs, but I love chocolate, and you Americans keep putting drugs in chocolate. Yeah, and then when you eat the drug chocolate, the regular chocolate tastes way better. Before you know it, you’re just in this chocolate consumption cycle. You’re literally like a stoned hamster lying at the bottom of the wheel watching the world go by until one day you wake up covered in chunky monkey ice cream in the middle of a racial hate storm on TikTok and you’re like, how did I get here? (audience applauding) Anyway, I got me mom stoned out of her ahead. Now if you know anything about Irish people, we take secrets to the grave, but that’s not the case on twice the recommended dosage. Oh, did she turn into a chatty Cathy all of a sudden. She’s like, David outta nowhere, “What do you think of gay marriage?” I said, what? And she’s like, nothing new to me, you know? I was the first lesbian in Ireland to get married in 1970.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, I was like, “Does dad happen to know about this?” Says it was his fecking fault. I said, “Please continue.” She’s like, “Well your dad couldn’t find his feckin birth certificate on the morning of the wedding. Now luckily we had his dead sister, Patricia’s.” I said, “Just hold on a second there, that’s big news. I never knew about that.” And she’s like, “Yeah, don’t worry about it. Your dad had a dead sister. She died when she was two. Not central here to the story.” (audience laughing) Yeah, I’m like that’s sounding pretty central to me ma’am, but okay. She’s like, “Well we couldn’t find Patrick’s birth certificate, but we had his sister, Patricia’s, and I didn’t wanna cancel that wedding. And the whole town knew the priest didn’t have the best eyesight. So technically and legally I’m married to your dad’s dead sister.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
That’s a lot to unpack, isn’t it? And she just kind of moved on lovely from that as if it wasn’t a thing. Now she dropped one other crazy bit of information. I’ll tell you in a sec but the next morning she woke up and she had a new lease on life and she wanted to do walking for no reason, and that’s a bit representative of your elderly American people ’cause you’re out there with your snowshoes and you’re hiking poles, just walking up stuff for no apparent reason, right? Irish people not like that. If you take an elderly Irish person and you put them somewhere, that’s where they’re gonna be. (audience laughing) They live there now. But not her, the weed cookies gave her a bit of new lease of life and we’re in San Francisco and she’s like, “David, I think I’ll go for a walk to the Golden Gate Bridge.” I was like, “Well Jaysus, that’s kind of far. I suppose it’s downhill. Go on. Feck it. Why not? Give it a go.” (audience laughing) She did not come back for eight hours. (audience laughing) When she finally kicked in the door, came in, and I was lying on the couch with me leg elevated trying to get better with it. And she was like a giggling teenager. She said, “Oh David, look at these”
Lululemon pants (audience laughing) Yeah, she kinda kicked out the hip and was like, “All the girls are wearing them. Does it make ass my look good?” It’s like, you haven’t even got an ass anymore. That thing’s like a bag of porridge back there. (audience laughing) She was having a great old time and couple of days in when I start getting better, she’s like, “David, I might give you a bit of space. I’ll go visit your uncle up in Seattle.” You know, the big fellow who hugged the president. Yeah, she goes up there, called me a day later, she’s like, “David, you’re not gonna believe where I am. I’m on a wakeboarding boat.” I said, there is no way you’re wakeboarding. She’s like, “Oh God, no, I’m not wakeboarding.” No, I have another thing. (Calling out) Rory, what’s it called? “I have a bong, David. (audience laughing) Oh, I am stoned out of my head. And your auntie’s here with me. I’m getting her stoned.” Oh, Jesus, my auntie used to be a nun. She married a priest. I don’t even know how that happened. (audience laughing) My mom started corrupting the whole family and after she nursed me back to health, she went away back to Ireland and I’ll never forget the message she sent me. It was lovely. It said, “David, I know we’re mother and son but now it feels like we’re friends.” Yeah, and I remember reading it going, this is a blue message. This is an iMessage? Did you get an iPhone? (audience laughing) Yeah, she’s like, yeah, goes well with me Lululemon pants.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
Smiley face and everything. Well, she went back home and she was corrupting the way the family. God love my uncle got Parkinson’s disease, and none of the traditional medication was working. And my mother being a newfound West coast hippie, have we tried any alternatives here? Maybe a bit of CBD oil or something. So I dunno what they were doing to him, but at one moment the little old ladies were over for tea and they were in that corner and my uncle was in his chair ’cause that’s where they left him. (audience laughing) And he stood up at one moment and they were like, well where’s he off to? And he was shaking a bit and they’re like, oh, he’s gonna fall. And he started falling, my auntie tried to get to him in time but she didn’t make it. He started falling on top of my auntie. My mother kicked into action. Obviously the nurse in her jumped up, didn’t make it in time. My uncle fell on my auntie, and the two of them fell on my mother and broke her leg. Yeah, and my uncle was just lying there smiling ear to ear. No idea what was going on. And the little old ladies were mortified ’cause he was pretty much dead weight They couldn’t move him so they had to go in and get the next door neighbor to help, and he was famously a bit of a smart ass with a good sense of humor on him. She came in and he’s like, “Well Jesus, if this fella’s going out, he’s going out with a bang.”
(audience laughing)
Look at him, ex priest lying on top of two sisters, huh? They’ll be talking about this one in the town.” My mam was so mortified by this whole scenario that she lied to me and she said she broke her leg when she fell off the back step of the house getting some firewood, and I only know the real story ’cause Dave Ryan from San Francisco, his cousin lived next door. That was the guy.
(audience applauding)
We are always connected.
(audience applauding)
Yeah, we really are. But there was one, the part I enjoyed the most about this is there was a bit of a tangent to the story that my mother added before she went off on her wander to Golden Gate bridge the night before. And as immigrants in America or anywhere in the world, we usually have one thing in common. Someone in our families was illegal at some stage. They might not be talking about it. They might be here now keeping it on the quiet. Just with my family, I didn’t know it was my mother. Yeah, until I got her slightly stoned. So it turned out when I was a kid, she used to work as a nurse in New York and come over and back and send the family money, and she disappear for a few months and come back again. And I just thought she missed her kids, which I’m sure she did, but it was more actually she was coming home ’cause she was being thrown out in various manners, or sneaking back in again on a different visa, or not overstaying something. Now and you know tonight I told you Irish people were sneaky buggers. I dunno if you know we have Irish names. So my name in English, David Nihill, in Gaelic Irish, Daithi O’Nihill. And to your immigration system, that’s a whole new person.
(audience laughing)
We’ve been using that one for a few years, and my mother definitely was. And then she’d used up all these kinda little tricks, and she’s there telling me about it and she’s like, “David, I was kind of outta options and I was at a point where geez I just needed another passport and I’d used everything I knew and sure, I was thinking Jaysus, that day and age to get a passport at that time you only really needed an extra birth certificate. Yeah, I had an extra one of those lying around, didn’t I?” Back from the grave. (audience laughing) This is a lot to unpack and some of you will figure it out at different moments and that’s okay. That’s what happened to me, ’cause she just went on to the next part, and it turned out she was working in New York at one moment in time as a nurse nursing back to health a particular lady of interest who’d fallen and broken her hip. That lady was Donald Trump’s mother. Yeah, my mother as an illegal immigrant.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
Was nursing back to health the mother of a guy competing on an anti illegal immigration mandate while traveling on the passport of a dead two year old. (audience laughing) Who she was also in an involuntary lesbian relationship with. (audience applauding) If that isn’t the most Irish American, potentially Latino, sneaky, maybe woke potentially gay story you’ve ever heard as brought to you by your US medical system, I don’t know what is. Thank you very, very, very, very much.
(audience cheering)
(audience applauding)
Thank you.
(audience cheering)
(audience applauding)
Thank you. (audience cheering) (audience applauding) Listen, you might be asking yourself these stories sound a bit bonkers. Was this fella just taken all of the weed himself and making them up? Especially in the case of my mother’s one, it sounds so outlandish. You’ll be like, is that true? And I’ll say for legal reasons, allegedly, it’s true. And also she warned me “you better not tell anyone about this feckin story, David.” She was pretty clear on that. So allegedly it happened. I dunno, you make up your own mind. But just so I’m off the hook, but I would love to show you one or two little characters before we get outta here ’cause I’m thinking it’s always nice to visualize something if you’re like, oh, I wonder did that actually happen? Have a look and see if you recognize this fella, or who he might be. (audience laughing) That’s Doug the psychopath. And he looks all cute, doesn’t he? And that is the definition of cat fishing when he got me. His little claws are already sticking out ready to go. And the reason I wanna share with you that is we live in a society where we’ve never processed so much information at a speed we’re not really capable of processing. So sometimes we miss things and in my case, that multiplies when you add being and a moron and dyslexic ’cause I had all the information I needed right here. This is the message my friend sent me about his lovely cat. “Just to give you a heads up though, he’s still a kitten and spent at least a couple of months on the street before we found him. He’s just been fixed, which seems to have calmed him down, but he does sometimes play with people by biting their wrists and ankles or pouncing from the darkness.” (audience laughing) “It’s never too violent and it’s never angry, and he’s mostly a sweetheart but just wanted to let you know that before you agreed to spend time in the house with him.” (audience laughing) Yeah, and like an idiot I wrote back, “Ha, no worries. Much appreciated.”
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I had all the information I needed, and this really did happen to me working on the Irish President’s mission, and that is the only time you’ll ever see me in a suit. And that is Mary McAleese, one of the 21 years of female presidents we’ve had while you’re still thinking about it. (audience applauding) Might be time. (audience applauding) Now obviously I’ve called America home for a long time, and I love living here so I don’t wanna be too sarcastic. You have made great progress recently. You got a Black little mermaid. (audience applauding) And that was huge for you as a country. I mean, very divisive initially, but you pull together and you work through it. And meanwhile while you were doing that, we found a Nigerian lady and we made her mayor of the town of Longford in Ireland, and she never had to identify as a fish or anything. (audience laughing) Just straight to a senior leadership position. But you keep telling us about being diverse, and maybe we’ll catch up. And that sounds a little bit stabby but feck it, I’ve lived here long enough and you said “if you see something, say something.”
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(audience laughing)
But my boss hated me so much over this uncle grabbing the president incident that here already, they’re trying to squeeze me out of this photo. They’re genuinely trying to block me as much as humanly possible. Now my boss hated me so much over this incident, she spent every day trying to get me fired and I’m here talking to you guys doing comedy so she definitely won. But America rubbed off om me so much I start believing, well I could probably do anything ever since the penguin stander upper incident and Americans encouraging you to do things, they’re like, you can do anything. And I say, I might write a book. I have no idea what about but might right one. I’m a dyslexic idiot. I don’t think I ever passed any form of spelling test in my life. I’ve never nailed a captcha. I can’t even get on the wifi in most places, and Americans are like “don’t let that stop you. You can do it. Just one word every day. Do the morning pages. This could be a great journey for you. You do it, you go on it, you live your you” whatever motivational speech, and I start believing it and was like, you know what? If I get to write a book, I’m so annoyed by this boss thing trying to fire me when I really shouldn’t have been, that I’m gonna put in a chapter on management relations. If I ever write this book, even it’s a picture book, it’s going in there. I don’t care. And wouldn’t you know it Americans rubbed off on me. I went for it, I took the advice, I wrote a book, it got published in a couple of languages and here is that section on management relations. My old boss, Roberts Diane, I’ve spelled her name backwards to protect her identity.
(audience applauding)
(audience laughing)
Genuinely, she had an intern with a government credit card go to a physical location with a physical photo and have them remove me from it. The 10% of me that’s actually visible, and then hung it back on her wall proudly. And nobody ever knew that story until now. (audience laughing) So, you know, some stories you wanna keep going. This one true also. So what is a racist comedian telling jokes about cotton picking is actually a person trying to make a very supportive statement about that Irish people were generally being well-behaved since 1845. In the words of Frederick Douglass, we’ve been knocking it outta park. Now that got a bit misinterpreted interestingly because there was no audio on the video that was posted. So everybody commenting on that and sharing it was trying me, judge, jury, and executioner, and not a single person stopped to go, “well what did that idiot say?” So if you were one of the people that stopped me squirting ice cream out of every available orifice in a moment of need, thank you very much. It was a moment of need. It’s the only reason I’m still doing comedy, so thank you.
(audience applauding)
Onto more positive things. Who do we think this is? Oh, that is my mother. That is said wake boarding boat. That is my cousin drinking Jack Daniels whiskey while wake boarding. That’s not how Red Bull imagined it to be done, and that’s my uncle that hugged the president, and in my mother’s hand is suspicious. (audience laughs) That is a gateway pipe to what became a bong later in the day, and she took upon corrupting my auntie who used to be a nun. (audience laughing) And because she used to be a nun in Ireland, as such a small world as we learned tonight, I’ve had to take precautions. (audience laughing) You think she’ll be okay with that? I dunno.
(audience laughing)
And you might say, did your mother really break her leg? That story sounded too crazy to be true. The crazy ones that the Irish ones, they’re always true. Look at her going there. Yeah, that was quite a break. And if you wanna see the evidence, she spent too much time on the west coast of America surrounded by avocados. (audience laughing) She ignored medical insurance and took to the magical healing properties of avocados, which is roughly the same price as medical insurance. Very unusual scenario. She recovered and she’s all good these days. So it had a happy ending. This one I love. That’s the half Indian gay leader of Ireland kicking into action to say, well done Morgan. We love your dancing. Basically shutting everybody up with all the negativity with something that was clearly positive and a connection of two cultures that are really intertwined going years back. And rather than giving out we’re praised her, brought her over to meet the president of Ireland and gave her an award for contribution to Irish culture. And that is how you appreciate culture, which is a much better thing.
(audience applauding)
And you might be asking yourself, well Jesus, this fellow’s been talking a lot about Ireland tonight all of a sudden. And I have been not just ’cause it’s where I’m from or ’cause I’m proud of it, which I am, but I think we’re a great example of a country that was thought to be backwards that suddenly went really, really forward. We were meant to be very white, and now we’re very diverse and multicultural, and we’ve done that pretty much seamlessly compared to a lot of the world. And at the end of the day, if I’m gonna spend my time doing comedy, I’d rather talk about things to unite us rather than divide us. So at the end of the day we can just be a bit nicer to each other ’cause realistically, well, we’re all a bit Irish, aren’t we? (audience applauding) At least a little bit. (audience applauding) And if you think you’re not, check your 23andMe results. Speaking of interesting things, who do you think this is? (audience laughing) Oh yeah. (golf club thumps mushroom) (audience laughing) 83 years young and still going strong.
Thank you very much. You guys have been fantastic.
(audience applauding)
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Thanks for coming out.
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(audience cheering)
Last quick question for you. Do you guys know where the exits are? They can be a little bit sneaky.
(audience applauding)
(audience cheering)
(shoes tapping)
♪ Ain’t never been with a chick this bad ♪
♪ Ain’t worried abut them other girls that you had ♪
♪ If I catch you looking at my baby I’m loud ♪
♪ Keep it real I ain’t worry about that ♪
(O’Wang) Next. Passport. Hey, my Irish brother. You said you’re not gonna make jokes about America.
Well, they said if you see something, say something.
♪ Why you always tripping for no reason ♪
♪ Tell him ’cause you put it on me better when you’re mad ♪
♪ Head around my neck hit it hard from the bag ♪
♪ I’ma cook a meal for him and play the game with him ♪
♪ With somebody ask yeah I’m with him ♪
♪ Keep him knocked out like painkiller ♪
♪ And if bag me, you know he a winner ♪
♪ Ain’t never been with a chick this bad ♪
♪ Ain’t worry about them other girls that you had ♪
♪ Catch you looking at my baby I’m loud ♪
♪ Keep it real I ain’t worried about that ♪
♪ Ain’t never been with a chick this bad ♪
♪ I ain’t worried bout them other girls that you had ♪
♪ Catch you looking at my baby I’m loud ♪
♪ We gonna keep it real I ain’t worried about that ♪
