For a start, Des Bishop not only nailed speaking Gaellic and Mandarin, doing shows in both, he’s now mastering Arabic with hopes to do the same. Then there was the time he learned how to dance like a demon for Dancing With The Stars. He also had testicular cancer and managed to make it funny. On top of all of that, Bishop’s not had an alcoholic beverage since he was 19, which is no small feat for an Irishman, let alone one on the comedy circuit. Basically, if it’s a backbreaker, Bishop will have a crack at it.
“It’s not so much that I’m compelled, per se, to want to do these challenges, but I realise how enjoyable these things are as they happen,” he says. “As far as Dancing With The Stars goes, it was a combination of timing and an indulgence. I don’t know if I’d put it in the same category as learning a language and trying to do comedy in another language, but the way I tackled it in the end was, as usual, with an intensity that some people might consider to be dysfunctional.”
Given that he’s not one to shy away from a challenge, it’s no surprise that he’ll push his gigs where angels fear to tread. His latest show, Egorithm, for instance, tackles both the male backlash against feminism and anti-Muslim hysteria. Interestingly, Bishop wrote the blurb for his show before #MeToo shook the foundations of the entertainment industry, but, of course, he’s not backing down.
“When everything was kicking off, I was like, ‘My god, I’ve committed myself to talking about something which is way more of a hot topic than I thought. To be honest, I also wanted to out myself at a time where I wasn’t as informed as I am now, in the sense that one of the good-slash-bad things about MeToo is that it shows a guy like me, who’s a little bit oblivious to what women have been dealing with, the reality of it.
“It’s easy to dismiss these things when you don’t know. It’s probably hard for a woman to understood how a man doesn’t know, but I think most men don’t really know or are only starting to realise the insidiousness of harassment, say, or the frequency of it. The seriousness of the topic, I find harder to deal with in a comedy sense now because I know more. I recently found my notes about some of the material that I intended to write, and it’s hard to look at it because I’m so much more informed than I was then.”
As for taking a swing at the anti-Muslim brigade, Bishop draws an interesting parallel. “There’s just some simple stupidity that’s associated with Islamaphobia, which is this sense that Muslims are inherently violent or that their religion is inherently violent, but their religion – as far as the text goes – is as violent or non-violent as any of the ancient texts, so using those handpicked examples to show that Muslims have a propensity for violence is just nonsense. Irish people remember a time where Irish people were pegged as inherently violent because of the IRA campaign, but even now there are people who will argue that was different.”
