Deirdre O’Kane: ‘I’ve reached a point where I’m not afraid to make people uncomfortable’

Deirdre O’Kane has a saying: God bless the work. The Drogheda-born comic is on tour with her new stand-up show, O’Kaning It, the schedule for which stretches into 2025, and includes 43 performances. Alongside her thriving comedy career, she juggles work as an actor, podcaster, TV host and voiceover artist. But nothing is taken for granted with O’Kane. At the end of our lunch, she’ll put the remainder of her San Pellegrino in her KeepCup – it’s too expensive to waste.

We’re in Il Caffe di Napoli on Westland Row in Dublin, sharing a Margherita pizza. Her dark hair and black sweater give off something of a rock-chick look. On her head are two pairs of glasses, while on her face is that knowing Deirdre O’Kane smile. She’s telling me about her first-ever job: a walk-on part in Borstal Boy at the Gaiety Theatre, in 1989. At the time, she was completing a night course at the then-new Gaiety School of Acting, and had been invited to put her name forward for a background part. By day, she was a student in the College of Marketing and Design, and desperate to drop out. But Gaiety School founder, and Borstal Boy director, Joe Dowling, had other ideas.

“He didn’t pick me. And I nearly lost the plot. I ran up the stairs to his office and banged on the door and said: ‘oh my God, you didn’t put me on the list’.”

I can only write about whatever stage of life I’m in. A lot of it is from the perspective of my kids asking me stuff, like ‘How did you meet?’

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“I was like: you don’t understand, I need an excuse to give my parents to get out of college. I’m not interested in marketing. I can’t spell marketing. I’ve done the guts of a year and I’m certainly not doing the exams, because I spent the whole time smoking fags in the canteen!”

So, O’Kane got her start.

For many years thereafter, she continued to pursue her acting dream. When she and a friend put on a play in The International Bar, it got a good review, and she was offered an audition with the renowned theatre company Druid. She ended up touring the world for two years as (yes) Miss Funny in Vincent Woods’s At the Black Pig’s Dyke.

“I thought every job would be like that, because I was so green. And then I never travelled again,” she laughs.

O’Kane’s acting career reached a level of success most would envy. She has played Debra Moone in Chris O’Dowd’s TV comedy, Moone Boy, and Noelene in the 2003 feature film Intermission. She’s graced the Abbey stage as well as the Gate and many others. Her performance as children’s rights campaigner Christina Noble in the 2014 feature, Noble, directed by O’Kane’s husband Stephen Bradley, won her an IFTA.

But the more acting work she did, the more she understood the hard truth about the occupation: “There’s not enough work. It’s as simple as that.”

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O’Kane knows the industry from multiple angles. She has been married to film director Bradley for almost 24 years, and the pair have two children together, Holly (19) and Daniel (15). They first met in the early 1990s, when Bradley, producer Ed Guiney, and actor, Paul Hickey, moved in next door to O’Kane, in The Liberties, Dublin.

“I knew Paul because he was an actor,” O’Kane says. “I had a bed that needed moving and they were getting a van. I said [to Paul], is there any chance you could come and move my bed? And he arrived with Stephen Bradley. So that’s how we met.”

It was Bradley who, however inadvertently, ended up introducing O’Kane to the world of comedy. He was working on a documentary about Kilkenny’s Cat Laughs festival. O’Kane was between acting jobs, and so went with him to Kilkenny. Watching the performers onstage, she had “a eureka moment”.

“I had never watched stand-up live. Ever,” she says. “I was so thrilled by it. I couldn’t believe it. I was mesmerised. I thought, wow, the control. And they’re up there on their own. And the audience is laughing.”

One comedian in particular, Anthony Clark, impressed her. “I loved his set, so I went to see him a second time. And then I went to see him a third time. I saw him deliver the same set without changing a word. And that was a penny drop. I thought oh, this is not a stream of consciousness. You have written something and you’re delivering it.”

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In the car on the way home, O’Kane began writing her own jokes.

“I remember the first joke I ever wrote, which was: It was inevitable that one of us would end up doing comedy, because for years my mother told us that the whole town was laughing at us.”

I laugh and she tells me that first jokes tend to be about family.

In her most recent show, O’Kaning It, family isn’t far from the agenda, either. She explores long-term relationships, raising teenagers and her own teenage years as a boarder at Loreto High School Beaufort.

“I can only write about whatever stage of life I’m in,” she says. “A lot of it is from the perspective of my kids asking me stuff, like ‘How did you meet?’. And then you visit that story.”

The material also pushes the boundaries of what she’s done to date.

“It is much darker than anything I’ve ever written before. And that was interesting to me. I think it’s age, and reaching a point where you’re not afraid to make an audience uncomfortable.

If you’re going into comedy now, as a woman, you will have female company. I didn’t have any for a decade. I didn’t realise that was something that held me back

“That’s hard-earned,” she adds. “You always think: oh, just make them happy, but now I’m way beyond that. Now, I’m like: can we just talk about the Magdalene laundries, because it needs to be talked about. It’s never going to be funny, but I happen to have a funny angle, and actually, I think it would be healthier [to talk about it].”

The phrase “hard-earned” is an understatement. Ask any comic in this country, male or female, and they’ll tell you O’Kane blazed a trail with her work. She carved a career as a woman stand-up at a time when such things were at best unheard of, and at worst scorned and ridiculed.

“When I started as a stand-up, I’d be introduced onstage and you would hear an audible sigh,” she says. “You’d hear a groan. ‘Ah, jaysus, here’s a woman, is she going to be any good?’ So, I had no room for error. I had to be good immediately, from hello. Okay, that makes you a better comic, for sure. But it was hard. I didn’t have any dick jokes to fall back on, which are useful. I couldn’t swear as much as other people. There were things I couldn’t say because people were uncomfortable. Women were considered to be unfunny.”

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Have things got better over time?

“I think this is the best possible time to be a woman, and I’m very aware of it, and very grateful for it,” she says. “If you’re going into comedy now, as a woman, you will have female company. I didn’t have any for a decade. I didn’t realise that was something that held me back. But I now know that it was. I just barrelled on.”

In the mid-noughties, while living in London and starting a family, O’Kane took a break from her comedy career. She raised her children, focused on other things.

“I think part of the reason I stopped was that I did find it really hard,” she says, in reference to the fact that she was a woman in a man’s world. “I never acknowledged that. I always said, oh, I was having babies. But that’s not actually the full picture. It might have been subconscious.”

The pause from comedy ended up lasting 10 years, after which time she had to virtually “start from scratch”.

“Apart from the loyal fan base I had, I was still pushing myself up a mountain.”

Around this time, she met fellow comic, Emma Doran. O’Kane had moved back to Ireland, and was doing a comeback show. Doran, then a fledgling stand-up, was the opening act.

The pair didn’t immediately become friends, but they continued to cross paths through work, and O’Kane admired Doran’s online content. On a hunch, O’Kane decided to ask Doran to do a podcast with her, and recently they launched Keep it Tight, a weekly meander through subjects that have “delighted” “bewildered” or “enraged” the pair. (The title refers to the oft-repeated mantra about keeping comedy sets short and to-the-point).

“There’s a lovely dynamic because she’s 15 years younger than me,” O’Kane says. “I like that. I think generational gaps are important. And we have wildly different backgrounds, and we’re able to slag each other, entertain each other.”

Womanhood, and the experience of growing older as a woman, is a theme that crops up again and again, both on the podcast and in O’Kane’s work more generally. She turned 56 earlier this year.

“My age will be printed, because everybody’s fascinated by women’s ages,” she says. “I don’t think men’s ages get printed to quite the same level.”

But the topic is something that fascinates her.

“Of course. I’m fascinated by the scrutiny that’s put on women. I’m fascinated by what we put on ourselves as a result of what we’re sold. Menopause was a subject that hasn’t really been talked about until now; the last five years. How did that happen? How did that remain a taboo subject for so long?”

The positive aspects of growing older as a woman interest her too.

“I feel, at the moment, better than I have ever felt, probably because I have one kid in college and another who’s 15 but can stand on his own two feet. So, I’ve got my life back. And I’m getting a second bite of the cherry, because I stopped for 10 years, so this is my second go.

“I’m so grateful that I have gone at it again. I have more energy now than I had ten years ago when my kids were small. I’m not run ragged now. I can actually commit myself to the work, and I’m loving that. And I can hit the road and not worry is somebody getting a dinner.”

If acting, podcasting and blazing a trail for women in stand up wasn’t enough, O’Kane has also been a finalist on Dancing with the Stars Ireland, hosted her own shows on RTÉ (Deirdre O’Kane Talks Funny) and Sky (The Deirdre O’Kane Show), and provides the voiceover for Gogglebox Ireland. Perhaps most importantly, though, she has channelled her energies into humanitarian causes, and is a co-founder of Comic Relief in Ireland. As part of this project, four years ago, she visited Gaza.

“I went to see where the Comic Relief money [was going]. We gave a quarter of a million to Trócaire that went to Gaza to help kids who were suffering from malnutrition. Before this horrific war that we’re all watching now, they already had conflict, and I mean conflict. The UN had said it would be inhabitable by 2020. The infrastructures were falling apart. The water was not clean. So, this situation is beyond the beyond.”

She knew the experience would be difficult, but she describes herself as “hardy”.

“Maybe that’s part of the boarding school thing. I come from strong people.”

Entering Gaza, she says was “like going to Guantánamo Bay”.

“It was really oppressive. Nobody can get in, and nobody can get out. I was told what not to say and all of that. I went in and visited one of the refugee camps, and visited our own thing, and met the kids. I just adored the people. When you have nothing, everybody’s equal, therefore, everybody’s generous and giving.”

Next week, she’ll do a fundraiser in Vicar Street, in aid of Gaza. “I’ve done a few already. I’m donating. But I kind of feel like there are a lot of people who are doing everything they can, and posting, and being as loud as they can, and trying to march, and I think the world’s leaders are failing us, and breaking our hearts.”

She pulls up her sleeve and shows me a tattoo of a dove. She got it recently, while on a work trip to Singapore.

“This is a piece I got done, because on that day, I got the news that one of the pharmacists that I had met in Gaza, him and his three children had been killed. And I wanted to get something marking–”

Here, she stops, visibly upset.

“Did I tell you I was hardy?” she grimaces, trying to hold back tears.

“I know I’m not alone. I’ve talked to grown men who have wept in a bar. Because it’s horrendous. I know it’s not personal to me, but I think collectively we’re traumatised. And I don’t know why we’re not louder. But it goes on. Anyway, Comic Relief is the single thing that I think that I can do and I’m so proud that we started it and that is and will be a focus of mine, I think, for the rest of my life.”

With a sense of resignation, we nudge the conversation on to other things. O’Kane tells me she’s back to her acting roots, working on a feature film her husband is currently shooting, called Fran the Man. It’s about a football match-fixing scandal.

“I play a travel agent called Dympna Greene, who is highly involved in it,” she says.

But her main ambitions are in stand-up.

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“I am fascinated by the art form. I’ve never lost my fascination with the psychology of it. How up and down it goes. A good show’s up, a bad show is down. Every room is a different energy.”

I ask how she prepares for shows, and she says that she often experiences an afternoon slump.

“It took me years to understand that that was my body conserving energy, because you’re going to go on stage for 75 minutes.”

She uses this time to meditate and bring herself down.

“Then, before a show, I just have to talk to myself,” she says. “I have to remind myself to connect with the room in a very visceral way. Because sometimes, if you go out without much thought, you’re not matching the energy in the room.”

O’Kane says that with the new show, getting used to the audience being uncomfortable is new territory.

“It gives me great respect for people who’ve gone before me and done this in a considerable way. But it’s been great. I mean, I don’t want to hold back. If you’re going to do it, go there.”

Deirdre O’Kane teams up with Benecol to promote happier, healthier hearts, as part of their ‘That Caring Friend’ campaign. Visit @benecol_ie on Instagram to find out more. For Deirdre O’Kane’s live dates, see deirdreokane.net. Irish Comics for Palestine takes place at Vicar Street, Dublin, on May 6th.