Emma Doran is an Irish comedian on the rise. She has just been cast in the Prime Video series LOL: Last One Laughing, hosted by Graham Norton, in which comedians are put in a house and have to make others laugh to get them evicted. On the evidence of her set last night Doran will surely be one of the favourites to win.
Her show, Mad Isn’t It – the title comes from the phrase she used in viral lockdown videos – is essentially a beginner’s guide to Doran, in which she finds the funnies in her family, from her parents to her partner and children. She is a natural storyteller, and so at ease onstage that you quickly relax, knowing that you are going to be thoroughly entertained.
The first section deals with her cul-de-sac careers before stand-up. Working in an office hunched over a computer can be fine, she jokes, unless your boss actually wants you to do some work when you’d rather be trawling travel websites.Later she ended up working in a cafe outside Dublin where she met her future partner. She was drawn to him because he was dishy but also dim. Her philosophy where men are concerned is fiendishly simple: “like dogs, you don’t want one that’s too smart.”
She is exceptionally good on the perils of parenting. The best thing about lockdown, she recalls, was the relief that she didn’t have to go to that bane of her life, endless identikit children’s parties. She essays a particularly convincing impression of tiny boys with way too much energy hurtling around like out of control racing cars.
Occasionally some feminism is dripped into the mix, such as the fact that when her mother was young the widespread practice was that Irish women had to give up their jobs as soon as they were wed, under the country’s marriage bar laws. It is hard to believe she is talking about the 1970s and not the 1920s.
Doran is in her thirties, but even when she describes her own childhood it frequently sounds like ancient history. There is more than an echo of C4 sitcom Derry Girls to her tales of terrifying nuns and how the local single sex schools had to have staggered start times so that the boys were not overwhelmed by lustful thoughts every morning.
At heart this is a crowdpleasing, upbeat show with end-to-end laughs. It scores heavily on the nostalgi-o-meter, with her vivid descriptions of fairground geezers with gammy arms, parents being considered weird because they didn’t drink and a son that would rather eat a book than read it. There is a final chance to see Doran in Soho tonight. You would be mad to miss her.
