Comedian Joanne McNally has told of suffering a ‘horrible’ panic attack live on stage last week after drinking a concoction of energy drinks and wine before the gig.
The Dubliner, who is currently on her sold out nationwide tour, The Prosecco Express, said she has learned a lesson from the incident, which caused her to have to cut the show short.
“I took a turn where I felt like I was kind of not in my own body and I didn’t know what I was going to say next.
“I had half a bottle of white wine and three cans of energy drink in the space of 40 minutes before I went on stage.
“So I’m guessing that was part of it,” she said.
Joanne recalled feeling the ‘turn’ coming on when she stepped on stage at the gig in Everyman Theatre in Cork last week.
“It was horrible,” she said.
“I could kind of feel it coming on and then my hands start shaking and I lose my words and I don’t know where I am in the show.
“And at one stage I was like, ‘Will I leave? Will I go?’”
The funny woman said she initially tried to ‘power through’ the attack, until she began to face heckling from the crowd.
Speaking to Ryan Tubridy on his RTE Radio 1 show on Wednesday, she said: “Obviously I have been heckled but not to the point I’ve really taken any notice. I’ve always been able to deal with it like. It was never anything too vicious, it was always drunken or stupid.
“I was in the middle of this completely outer body experience.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do, didn’t know what I’d said, what was going to come next.
“I was trying to power through. I didn’t want them to see that I was struggling with this, whatever was going on. There was a lot going on.
“And then this young one shouts out, ‘Where’s this going?’
“I was genuinely about to go, ‘I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine because I have no idea what’s happening now’.”
But the popular podcast host, who is the co-star of ‘My Therapist Ghosted Me’ alongside pal Vogue Williams, said another fan jumped to her rescue.
“The women who come to the show, and men come too, they are so sweet. If I stop talking just for a second to breathe, they are like ‘Come on Joanne’. Like I’m a racehorse,” she laughed.
“So she shouted that out and I was having this, I call it a turn, and some woman shouted out ‘space gins’’
“I talk about having gins in the sky a lot. And then we just kind of carried on. This woman kind of saved it.”
Joanne said she has learned her lesson after the incident, which also resulted in her having to shorten her set.
She said: “I usually do about 65 minutes, I think that night I did about 50 and I was like, ‘I need to get off the stage’.
“But I learned my lesson. I have a lot of shows to do, I’m pretty much gigging every night and so the energy drinks are gone now so I’m learning as I go.”
The busy stand-up star, who is also set to appear on the second season of RTE’s panel show, Clear History, on Thursday night, revealed she has recently discovered she has an ‘overactive nervous system’, and told how she has struggled with anxiety since the pandemic hit.
On how it all ended up culminating as an anxiety attack on stage last week, she added: “I’m either in flight or fright mode all the time, one of them, I’m stuck in one of them. I think the panic attacks are part of that and I think the stress of the shows and stuff.”
The Killiney native went on: “I think it’s a perfect storm of stuff.
“Before lockdown I - I’m not going to say I didn’t believe in anxiety because that’s like saying I’m a flat Earther.
“Of course I believed in anxiety… but when people said they had bad anxiety I just..anxiety to me is a part of life.
“Everyone has certain stages in their life where they’re more anxious than others. And everyone is triggered when things are bad or whatever..
“But during lockdown I genuinely started suffering with my nerves as they’d say.”
“And I guess there was so much going on, everyone was a bit on the edge.”
