The Bishop And The Bond

Des Bishop has been having a funny time of late. This might seem fitting given that the 35 year-old New Yorker is one of Ireland’s best known stand-up comedians, but it’s been more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha...

“Just literally the last couple of weeks have been tough, I have to say,” he admits, with a helpless shrug. “And I couldn’t put my finger on it either, just weird moments where, like, I woke up one morning and I just... missed my dad.”
His father, Mike, passed away last February following a tough two-year battle with cancer. Ten years ago, Des had turned his own struggle with testicular cancer into comedy material, and he was to do the same with his father’s terminal illness.
He has just published a memoir entitled My Dad Was Nearly James Bond, inspired by the acclaimed stage show of the same name – a collaboration with Mike based around “the heroics of fatherhood.” A former model and actor (who had once auditioned for the role of 007), Mike had given up his glamorous life to father three sons and become a typical suburban husband and dad, working in a Manhattan clothes store to support his family. Although he had certain regrets about the life choices he had made, doing the show with Des gave him a taste of fame in his dying days. Mike appeared onstage nightly during its successful run at the Edinburgh Festival in 2010.
Galway filmmaker Pat Comer (director of the IFTA-winning In The Name Of The Fada with Des) made a TV documentary about the stage show, filmed in the Bishops’ family home in Queens, NY, and at the Edinburgh Festival.
For Des, the memoir is “the final chapter of this very public journey.”
“I just woke up one morning and everything was meaningless or too much, just really confused and agitated. These are emotions I’m not used to because I can usually put my finger on a thing and say, ‘It’s this’ or, ‘It’s that thing that I did last night. I feel a bit shit’. I don’t think it’s depression but I can see why people who are depressed really struggle with it because you can’t put your finger on exactly what it is. That’s what it felt like, just this fuckin’ all-encompassing emotion that’s not clearly just ‘I miss my dad’, but it’s just a big build-up of things.”
It’s shortly after 7pm on the night before Hallowe’en in Dublin city centre. We’re in the quiet environs of the Comedy Club room above the International Bar (he has run the club, which now opens seven nights a week, since 1998), the two of us sitting alone in the dark at a battered table beside the empty stage.
Although Des has been having a strange time of it lately, he’s relieved that the book is finally out. Was it difficult to write?
“Yes and no,” he says. “Probably more ‘no’ in the sense that I was working away on the live show and the documentary and everything, so I had a fair idea of the story, but ‘yes’ in the sense that it was more difficult to finish it. It was easy to get the stuff out on paper, but it was more difficult in terms of sculpting it into a proper narrative and letting go.”
The book is a far darker affair than either the stage show or the TV documentary. While it’s primarily about Mike’s often difficult life, by necessity much of Des’s own story was woven into the narrative.
He admits that he was unsure about this structure. “At times I just felt like an intruder into my dad’s story, and it took me a long time to figure out how there was a reason to have that in, you know? So that, from that point of view it was difficult, but from the point of view of emotionally writing it down, not so much.”
Mike was still alive when Des first began putting pen to paper. “I was already writing it before he died. He was involved in the proposal, like, in the sense that I said, ‘Dad I’m gonna write it, I’m gonna finish off the trilogy of shit that we’re doing with your life with a book’. He was into that and Penguin had commissioned it.
“I had said to them, ‘I’d like to get most of this done before he dies, I don’t want this to be a book about grief, I want this to be a book about the journey to death’. Unfortunately, he died very quickly so it changed the dynamic a bit, but I still stayed pretty focused on it not being about afterwards.”
The immediate aftermath of Mike’s passing wasn’t as difficult as anticipated.
“We were all so together as a family, and it was such an intense emotional experience that the afterwards personally for me wasn’t as difficult as I thought, but then in a way this was almost part of the performance, you know? This was like the final chapter of this very public journey.
“It’s really raw, but so was a lot of the stand-up, a very immediate portrayal of emotion, which is good in one sense because it’s really immediate. But on another level, some of the things that I speak about in the book say, with real certainty, I wouldn’t have the same certainty now because I realise it ain’t that simple.”
He tells me that his father – who had a couple of youthful movie bit-parts, including Day Of The Triffids, to his credit – relished all the belated attention and was particularly delighted with Comer’s documentary. “It was a great distraction for my dad. It was great on so many levels and now we have that for ourselves. Also he died kinda a little bit famous in Ireland, which was you know, I said that in the book but if you knew my dad you’d know that that means a lot. He was a really nice guy, but he was vain and he liked the fact that people were seeing the documentary and he liked watching it himself, he liked looking at himself. He liked being the star of the show.”
Wanting to be the star of the show obviously runs in the Bishop family. Des’ younger brother Aidan, who lives in Ireland too, is also a successful stand-up.
“Yeah, that’s definitely the mix of my father and my mother, you know? Because my dad is a real performer but my mother is really outspoken and kinda confrontational so the mixture of the two things I think make a good comedian.”
What was your mother’s take on the book?
“She was mixed, you know? My dad tried to write a memoir years ago, and she was actually the one that was typing it up, so she wasn’t too concerned about my father telling his story and she is quite used to me being quite personal – but even I was a bit taken aback by the stuff I write about coming to Ireland so young. Even though I’ve done therapy and I’ve talked about that since, like leaving home at 14? Man, when I saw it in words, I really just thought, ‘Fucking hell, I was mad lonely back then’.”
Des’ parents sent him to boarding school in Ireland when he was an angry young teen getting into silly scrapes in New York. While things definitely worked out for him over here (although he still has a strong Queens accent), he’s obviously still conflicted over how it happened.
“I guess there’s like an admission from me that maybe that wasn’t the best thing that my parents could have done,” he avers. “Even though it worked out it was a weird one. I think my mother struggled with that being on paper because she was really concerned that everyone would think she was a shit mother.”
They actually had a falling-out over it. “We had a brief period after I wrote the book and she read it but it wasn’t out yet, it was around the time when you had to get consent forms and make sure everybody’s happy, and I had to get consent forms off her siblings as well, so I guess she was becoming aware that other people were going to be seeing this. We had a bit of a difficult time, not so much she didn’t want the book coming out – but I guess I was pissed off at her because I had a little recall about my own anger around all that stuff. And she was having a tough time with me, just thinking it’s bad enough losing your fuckin’ husband, now I’ve got this shit to deal with. That didn’t last very long, we got to the other end of it quite quickly, but not too quick either.”
All was forgiven on both sides, and his mother came over to Ireland for the launch. “That was great because she got very involved, she did a few interviews, she did The Moncrief Show with me, she did The Ray D’arcy Show. She just likes coming along for the ride, and we got there and they were like, ‘Do you want to sit in and say a few things?’ and both times she said yes. And also she spoke at the launch and it just became like suddenly she didn’t need to worry about people perceiving her badly because now she was part of this. It wasn’t like she was the villain of the piece, and certainly nobody has said, ‘God your mother was a fuckin’ wagon!’ People don’t feel that and obviously she’s not getting that back from anybody, including her siblings who are now reading the book. Now it’s just positive.”
To date, the only negative reaction has been from his late father’s sister. Uncomfortable with some of the book’s revelations about her own mother (a schizophrenic who was at one point jailed in England for viciously beating the teenage Mike), she insisted that her name be changed.
Des is somewhat puzzled by her reaction, given that she herself filled him in on many of the family’s darker secrets. “She told me all that stuff knowing that I was writing the book,” he explains. “She was very involved but then, in the end, she wasn’t happy with it for whatever reason. That’s why, like, her name is not her real name. I don’t know what the legalities are in terms of talking about it, and I haven’t really talked about it with anybody else, but she wasn’t delighted. But we’re not that close with them, there was a distance there. I don’t really mind because I think in the bigger picture she will realise that there’s nothing to be upset about.”
Some of Des’ revelations about his own teenage years make for quite uncomfortable reading. He’s excruciatingly honest about his own dishonesty, and his problems with booze and drugs. He even admits to thieving money from his friends in boarding school at one stage. While he has regrets, he insists that his actions back then weren’t at all indicative of his true character.
“I was a little bit worried about the robbing kids off the dorms [part] but like, nobody has picked up on it. I’m comfortable in myself that I don’t think that has anything to do with my character today, but at the same time, if you think back to that time, like I don’t know if you went to boarding school but anyone who got caught robbing in the dorms, their reputation never recovered, they were always a fuckin’ scumbag. That’s the lowest of the low.
“And I would have thought the same, that it was the lowest of the low. And it was genuinely through desperation for cash that I began to do it. So I wanted to put it in because my drinking-slash-using story, on the level of comparing it to other stories, lacks drama, but at the same time it’s like everything’s relative, and that was a big deal for me to end up doing that because essentially you’re putting everything on the line. You’re nearly better off robbing a shop or a granny. If you get caught robbing from your mates... that’s terrible.
“I thought about not putting it in, but the only reason I wasn’t gonna put it in was I was concerned about somebody like the Mail or the Herald doing like one of this things that’s not even a bad article – but the headline insinuates this horrific thing. So I was worried about giving them a bit of fuel. But first of all, that hasn’t happened, and second of all, who gives a fuck? I’m comfortable enough to know that the shit I did when I was 17 has nothing to do with what I’ve done today.”
Although he quit using drink and drugs at the age of 19, Des still considers himself a recovering addict. Comedy can be a notoriously hedonistic profession. Has he ever been tempted to hit the bottle again?
“Nah, no no, I mean I had my struggles for the first few months then but I was heavily involved in fellowship and all that stuff and it was a huge part of my life particularly in the first few years. Now it’s just so far removed from my life it doesn’t even come into the equation. But I’m pretty sociable, I’m still very close with a lot of my buddies from college, particularly nowadays guys that still drink and some of them still smoke weed.”
It can be difficult to be around people who are drinking and drugging when you’ve quit.
“Yeah, it was earlier, it’s not so much now because you get in your 30s and your buddies don’t booze it up as much,” he says. “Besides, I like when they get a bit loose with a few drinks. And still to this day, this might not be a popular sentiment but I still like when people are fuckin’ high when they’re dancing. I like the energy. I hate the fact that people don’t take as much drugs in nightclubs anymore, in the sense that I wish it wasn’t the drugs that fuelled it but I miss the culture.
“I’m not saying everyone should take drugs, but I do miss the focus. There was this focus on dancing and you just don’t have that nowadays.”
What gets you high nowadays?
“Well a good dance gets me high, but on a fuckin’ rare day. Silent disco once or twice got me going. I love... pussy.” He laughs uproariously. “Pussy is still a weakness, man! Well, I mean I’m single so I still… you know.”
Is comedy good for pulling women?
“Comedy is great for chicks!” he enthuses. “Just couldn’t lie about that. I mean whatever, like, I’ll use myself and Aidan… I guess girls think we’re good-looking or whatever, they seem to find us attractive – that’s a very Irish way of saying it, in the States I’d just say, ‘We’re two good-looking guys’ – so it’s not that hard to meet chicks. We’re both reasonably confident around that, too, but then when you add in the fact that you’re up there and you’re making people laugh and you’re the centre of attention, it makes it really fuckin’ easy to meet women.”
In fairness, having inherited some of their father’s model looks, the Bishop brothers are undeniably tall, blonde and chiselled. However, just being a comedian sems to be enough to make you a sex magnet.
“I won’t give any examples, but you see other comedians and they get chicks and you say, ‘Well then comedy must be good for getting women because these motherfuckers are ug-ly!” he laughs (before giving some off-the-record examples).
In the book you mentioned an engagement which fell apart because you weren’t willing to risk your career by moving to the UK...
“Yeah, that was a bad break-up,” he says. “I don’t wanna talk about it, only because she’s really private, like seriously private, and I skirt around the issue in the book because I only wanted to talk about her in the context of that admission: that I genuinely wouldn’t even allow myself to think about moving to London because I’m so afraid of repeating my father’s mistake of leaving while the going was good. But yeah, like, whatever. I fucked that one up a little bit. That would be the extent of what I’ll say, just so she doesn’t get freaked out.”
Outside of just getting laid, are you good with women generally?
He shoots me a puzzled look. “I’ve many different answers for that, what d’ya need?”
Do you go for short relationships?
“No, I don’t go for short relationships but as I say in the book, the show previous was called Desfunctional. It was kinda inspired by that break-up, but I was trying to tackle a little bit of the shit I was noticing about myself which I thought must be quite common... like intimacy is definitely not my strong point.”
Is this not perhaps a continuation of the thing with your dad?
“How do you mean?”
You didn’t want to move to London because that was the mistake he had made in moving to New York. Maybe you saw him having kids and watch his dreams of fame and becoming an actor dissipate because of that, and you don’t want those responsibilities. Could that be why your relationships don’t work?
“No, I don’t think so,” he says. “I would love to have kids, that’s definitely one thing I’ve gotten out of spending the time with my dad – because it was what mattered to him at the end. No, I’d say it has more to do with my relationship with my mother, when you get down to the brass tacks of it, and it’s definitely… how do you explain it?”
He stares off into space for a moment, trying to choose his words...
“Sometimes I feel this sense of letting go is like defeat... that’s not the best way to put it. It’s hard to articulate but it’s like a sense of – yeah, I’m very guarded with that shit. I’m really open about a lot of stuff, emotionally, you know? But words are empty. I’m a performer, but when it comes to the crunch I definitely falter a lot on that moment when you know you need to be close or you need to be nurturing or you need to allow yourself to be nurtured. I definitely can be overguarded.
“It’s a toughie,” he continues. “So, a guy said to me once that, ‘People like you…’ – in other words ‘the wounded’ or people who struggle with intimacy – ‘they tend to be unguarded when they should be guarded, and they put the armour up when they don’t need it and they fuckin’ take it off when they need it’. I definitely have a bit of that.
“I’m quite honest sometimes in my performance talking about some personal shit, which is great, but it’s out to a load of anonymous people. So it seems easy but you’re opening yourself up in a way that might not be safe. Yet at the same time, I could be sitting here with a girl I’ve been going out with for six months and she could be like, ‘What’s going on with you?’ and I go, ‘There’s nothing going on with me, what the fuck’s going on with you?’ (laughs) you know what I mean? Just no desire to open up at all… if you’re struggling with something and somebody gives you good advice, you’re like, ‘Fuck you, man!’ and then two days later you’re like, ‘Why did I jump at that person, why did I do that?’”
Do you still have a short fuse?
“Ah not so much. A little bit. I can be quite passionate. It’s definitely one thing about the neighbourhood we grew up in. People are quicker to let out the shit that’s pissing them off. I think it’s a little bit of a New York thing. People take it the wrong way here sometimes. They prefer to quietly bitch about stuff than let it out. Ireland is more passive-aggressive just as a natural, cultural way of dealing with things. I would definitely not be a big fan of the passive-aggression, but at the same time, maybe still to this day I’m a bit quick to just, like, lose the head with somebody. I’m still a bit moody.”
In the book Des admits to beating up one of his schoolfriends at the height of his drinking and drugging. However, he denies being a violent type generally.
“When was the last time I threw a punch? I threw a punch outside here about four years ago. I missed the cunt! Nah, this guy was being an asshole, really, really drunk and just like heavily passive-aggressive, wouldn’t let it go you know? Of course, I should have walked away but my final play on it was just to go up to him and be like, ‘Look man, I’m sorry’ even though I hadn’t really done anything wrong. I was just trying to be the better man and he like half-accepted it and then it was something else. He had a drink in his hand, I fuckin’ knocked the drink out of his hand and I tried to hit him, but I missed him actually.
“To be honest, in this very room we’re sittin’ in now there’s been a few incidents over the years, and that’s only because it’s close quarters, and there’s booze involved and we don’t have security. I never feel bad about that because it’s just situations that get quickly out of control and it’s nobody’s fault. But I haven’t looked for violence since I stopped drinking.”
You run the Comedy Club with Aidan. Given that you’re both comedians, is there sibling rivalry?
“Funnily enough, I’m reading Jonathan Franzen at the moment,” he says. “I read Freedom and now I’m reading [The] Corrections which is the wrong way around, but both of the books, a lot of the behaviour is seriously motivated by sibling rivalry and it’s fuckin’ toxic in these books, so I’ve been thinking about it. People often ask about myself and my relationship with Aidan because this book is so like – it wears it on its sleeve. I was thinking, like, what is there between me and Aidan?
“And the way I look at it is: sibling rivalry is what it is, but I think that just motivates us. I still want him to do better than everybody else in Ireland. I would kinda do anything for him, but I haven’t done that much for him because I never wanted anyone to be able to turn around and say, ‘You fuckin’ got what you got because your brother was big here by the time you got over here’. I do a lot more for him now, only because I feel that he earns it. I’ve looked after a lot of guys so why the fuck wouldn’t I look after my brother?
“So it’s kind of weird, because yes, at times we do stuff together, like later tonight we’re gigging together. If he does really well, I find that harder to follow than say, if DO’D did really well. You feel he’s just more like you. So it’s harder to go out there and not think they’re looking at me going, ‘Oh! Aidan was actually good’, you know? But then, outside of that, I want him to do better, so I think it’s just a healthy rivalry. And I probably only admit that now because I’m reading the Franzen books, and I can just see that it is a big motivator for people.”

Career-wise, with countless hours onstage, four successful TV series, and a few tabloid moments to his credit, Des is definitely way ahead of his younger brother. What’s the biggest room you’ve ever played?
“The biggest personal gig, the biggest gig I ever did that was just me was The Marquee in Cork. 4,000. That’s my peak.”
Has the recession hit the comedy scene badly?
“It’s hard to say,” he mulls. “I was doing a bit better a couple of years back, but I don’t know if you could totally put that down to the recession. I haven’t done a series on TV for four years. So I’m going nicely. I mean, I’m not selling as many tickets as I sold in 2006 but, at the same time, I’m still selling more tickets than I need to sell. Every career has peaks and troughs.
“But I do think that comedy is good value and it does good in a recession. I’ll tell you what’s definitely hit – tickets sell later. A €25 ticket for Vicar St. is gonna sell a lot later than it used to because people are just going, ‘I’m not buying four fuckin’ tickets for this show and then it turns out we can’t go’, so they’re gonna make sure that they can go. So it’s definitely affected it, but maybe not as bad as other industries.” He looks around the room. “It’s definitely not hitting places like this.”
It’s time to wind up. The Comedy Club will be opening its doors later, but neither Bishop nor his brother will be performing. Instead they’ve got a gig in Portlaoise. In a couple of weeks, Des is heading down under for a short Australian tour. Coming off the emotional intensity of his father’s illness and death, and the creative demands of the show, documentary and memoir, he’s feeling depleted. However, the show must go on...
“It’s tough just right now to be honest and that’s just because – and everyone said it was gonna happen – the transition from what I was doing the last two years into something else, isn’t easy. And I just have to work that one out. I don’t have much time. I’m under pressure because I committed to a tour probably a little bit early so the next couple of months are probably not going to be the most fun of my career, but I mean it’s great, you need a deadline.”
Is he writing a new show?
“It’s slow. I’m going to Portlaoise after this and I have fuck-all to say! I’m going to Australia in a few weeks to do these like, ‘I have fuck-all to say’ shows, in other words, I’m just gonna go out there with a few very bare ideas and just try and flush ‘em out on stage. It’s not the first time I’ve been in this situation, but it’s the first time I’ve been in this situation where the show I’ve done previous doesn’t really give me any bridging, because it was such a specific thing and also it was such a journey.
“It’s hard to come back to just normal stand-up,” he continues. “Usually what you can take is 15 minutes from your last show to get you going on your new one, just get a bit of rhythm, a bit of momentum. I don’t even have that so stand-up wise, I’m the most naked I’ve ever been. I’m so depleted of jokes.
“But I went to see Dylan Moran last night and I was pretty inspired, as I always am by him. I was just inspired by how he came out and just started talking about the presidential election, and it was really good and solid. Sometimes you just have to let yourself talk about whatever, and the jokes just come. So I have no choice. I just have to do that now.”

My Dad Was Nearly James Bond is published by Penguin Ireland (€16.99)