Last time comedian John Colleary spoke to Hot Press, he was gearing up for his biggest headliner yet. The 3Olympia gig, unfortunately, had to be rescheduled for this May. Still, eight months later, he remains in good spirits.

“I kept working in between,” Colleary explains. “So it's been slowly building up, and I'm looking forward to it. Now, I just want to get out there and have some fun with it.”

The upcoming show, he says, will look somewhat different to what it would have been like back in September: “It's never fully set one way. It's always changing. New things come all the time. New ideas or new bits.”

It's indicative of the Sligo native's improvisational approach to standup.

"It's never too disciplined, what happens," Colleary says. "It’s always bits thrown together, but with a thread through them. But it's never defined as the one thing where you could go from one night to the next doing the same gig.”

”I've tried the disciplined approach before,” he continues. “And it ends up not working at all, because my mind shuts down a bit. So it's better that I have all the bits that I want to do just floating around, and then just start talking and let them come the way they come.

“You're standing there in front of people all the time – you might change your material because the energy in the room is different than what you thought it would be. You have to have it more flexible, so you can just draw on it a bit easier, rather than being disciplined and sticking to a complete agenda or sequence.”

Does the unpredictability ever add a heightened sense of pressure?

“You just hope for the best all the time,” he laughs, “because you never know what will fall apart at any second.”

Colleary, is, by all means, a seasoned comedian – a title which comes with its fair amount of wisdom. Despite his experience, he highlights the importance of being open to instruction.

“I see something I can learn from in everybody,” he explains. “People at the very beginning of their career, people who’ve been doing it for 30 years... There's always some things that they do that make me perk up and go: ‘I'm learning something here.’”

When I ask about the comedians who inspired him to dive into this unconventional career, Colleary is quick to answer.

“It was always Billy Connolly, when I was very young – Billy Connolly, Richard Pryor," he says. "But it was more as an observer, a consumer, than to see the technique that they were using.”

He also mentions his work with Tommy Tiernan, who he supported 2022, before Tiernan labelled him as “his favorite comic”.

“I observed how he did it and how he works,” Colleary continues, “and he really impressed me, in the way he formulates material, how he takes an experience and turns it into a really, really brilliant standup.”

Are there any first-hand experiences that have taught him as much as observing his peers?

”The bad stuff was always more memorable, so it was more instructive,” he laughs.

“But I remember doing gigs in Sligo, where I come from, in the early days… There’s one in particular – I’d only been doing standup for about six months, and I did a gig in a pub that was so energetic, but I couldn't actually cope with it.

“The laughs were so big, like I'd never experienced as a comic. I've never had that amount of laughs. And I left the room in my head, scowling, exhausted."

Colleary’s performed in virtually any type of venue you can fathom – small pubs in Sligo, TV sets, corporate events and now, the Olympia. The small gigs still have a special place in his heart.

“When you're in small rooms and there's 60, 70 people and everyone's packed in tight, the energy is just so high, you could nearly touch it," he reveals. "It's a real presence. I really enjoy that aspect of what we do. And the Olympia is one of those gigs as well – I've been to so many shows in there, and even though it's a big room with a lot of people in, it's got that feeling of being intimate as well.”

To get to this point in his career, the comedian has also experienced his fair share of silent rooms and jokes that didn’t land.

“In the beginning, if stuff doesn't go well, it's very heartbreaking," he says. "You really think: ‘this is not for me, I shouldn't be doing this.’ And then a week later, you go out and you do something else and it's great fun.

“And you come away from that gig going: ‘This is the best job in the world.’ So once I got used to the actual reality of doing a bad gig, I didn't fret about it anymore”

I ask if his introverted nature made the feeling any worse.

“It's probably a bit of acting, up there – but I always thought I wanted to do standup," he says. "I really wanted to do it badly, so I was willing to take the pain of being afraid of it, of petrified nerves in the beginning.

“Then I got over that – and I still remain as an introverted type person at home, but I'm over the fear. When you’re performing on stage, you think something bad is going to happen. But then you realize that just because you don't do well with stuff, no one gets hurt.”

Accompanying his exploits as a standup comedian is an impressive portfolio as a writer. Colleary has worked on number of beloved Irish TV programmes, like The Savage Eye or Irish Pictorial Weekly. It's a period of his career which holds a special place in his heart.

“The biggest kick I got from writing was writing for other people,” he reminisces. “Seeing other people perform things that I wrote is extremely gratifying. And I still love that feeling. Seeing somebody else with your words and doing a brilliant job with them, I think that's great.”

“I'd like to do more writing, because I just love it,” he adds. “I haven't sat down with it for quite a while, so I'd love to get back into creating a bit of a script and a few sketches.”

With his central place in the Irish comedy scene, Colleary has kept an eye on its evolution in the past few years. It looks very different than it did 20 years ago.

“There's a lot more people doing comedy now – when I started off, I got ahead quicker than people would today, because there weren't that many new acts," he says. “Things changed in terms of the Internet, social media, and the amount of content that you can create without even going near a stage. But I think it's healthy that there is so much out there.”

A common theme throughout Colleary’s work is his love for his home country, and how he enjoys poking fun at it and its people. In his humour, too, the comedian is decisively and unapologetically Irish.

“I'd say that Irish comedy itself is on a par with England and the US, but I think Irish people in general are funnier than people in other countries,” he smiles. “Just an awful lot of naturals – everyone's a comedian in Ireland: basic, simple. Everyone has smart ideas and smart, quick-witted answers.”

“In England,” Colleary concludes, “people go: ‘that's really funny!’ But in Ireland it's like: ‘my brother is funnier than you.’ I just love it.”

• John Colleary plays Dublin's 3Olympia on May 15.