Al Porter

Tallaght, panto, and an unusually fast start

Alan Kavanagh was born on 6 January 1993 and grew up in Tallaght, on the south-western edge of Dublin. He started performing at ten, in Christmas pantomime at the Olympia Theatre in the city centre, and the panto grounding never really left the act: the broad delivery, the singing, the willingness to work a room rather than wait for it to come to him.

The rise was steep. By his early twenties he was headlining Vicar Street, the 1,000-capacity Thomas Street venue that functions as the promotion test for Irish comics, and by twenty-two he was doing it for three nights running. Vicar Street's own artist page still describes him as the youngest Irish comic to have headlined the building. That is the shape of the career in miniature — an old-fashioned variety performer's skill set arriving in someone far too young to have earned it by the usual route of a decade in back rooms.

At Large, and the year everything arrived at once

The Edinburgh Fringe show At Large, in August 2016, was the moment the wider industry noticed. It was nominated for Best Comedy Show at that year's Edinburgh Comedy Awards — the prize known for two decades as the Perrier — in a field that included James Acaster's Reset, Nish Kumar, Kieran Hodgson, Zoe Coombs Marr and Tom Ballard. Richard Gadd won it for Monkey See Monkey Do. Reviewers at the time kept reaching for the same comparison: a seasoned club turn somehow inhabiting a 23-year-old.

Irish broadcasting moved quickly on the back of it. In February 2017 Porter took over a midday slot on Today FM, running from noon to 2.30pm, and on 8 October 2017 he began presenting a revived Blind Date on TV3. Within the space of a year he had gone from Fringe nominee to a national radio show and a Saturday-night television format.

November 2017, and the six years that followed

On 18 November 2017, Metro and The Times reported four allegations of sexual misconduct made by figures within the comedy industry. Porter said he was completely taken aback by the reports and resigned from Today FM immediately. The television work and the touring stopped with it.

The legal picture resolved slowly and largely in his favour. Two investigations into an alleged incident in a hospital in October 2015 found no evidence of assault. A separate allegation dating from 2016 was dropped in November 2019. In October 2019 he pleaded guilty to obstructing an arrest on Camden Street in Dublin, and the charge was dismissed with a judicial warning.

He did not perform stand-up for six years. In interviews since he has described that period in blunt terms — depression, weight gain, the strain on his family — and has been careful not to present the legal outcomes as an erasure of what was said. Speaking to the Irish Examiner in July 2025 he used the phrase "we judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge other people by their actions", and described a daily practice he calls "living your amends".

A Work in Progress: the 2023 return

The comeback was announced in November 2022 and tested in public at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, in a small room at Just the Tonic Nucleus, under the deliberately unfinished title A Work in Progress. Chortle's Steve Bennett reviewed it on 25 August 2023 and gave it four stars, noting that the personal low points were reclaimed as comedy high points and delivered with what he called tornado-force, and that there was no self-pity in it. His verdict was that the show had all the elements for a powerhouse comeback, conditional on whether audiences and other comics were prepared to have him back.

That run also took Mervyn Stutter's Spirit of the Fringe award for 2023, one of the festival's word-of-mouth prizes rather than an industry one — which, for a comic trying to find out whether a room would still laugh, was arguably the more useful signal. The material was then built out into the touring show Al Porter Now, which sold out across Ireland through 2023 and 2024.

Algorithm: the present-tense show

Algorithm was announced in March 2025 and opened at the end of August that year in Naas, with Cork Opera House on 31 August 2025 and a run of regional theatres through the autumn and into 2026 — the Dean Crowe in Athlone, the Backstage Theatre in Longford on 14 November 2025 at €25, Esker Arts in Tullamore on 28 February 2026.

The deliberate change is that it is not about 2017. Where Now dealt with the hiatus and the wreckage, Algorithm is domestic and current: what Instagram's recommendations imply about his mental health, learning to tolerate a house share, his parents adjusting to an empty nest after he finally moved out in his early thirties, why his brother is the golden child, and the logistics of being godfather to a German child. He told the Irish Examiner in July 2025 that it was the show of his most firmly grounded in the present, and that he liked the idea of an audience not knowing quite what it was going to get, "because humans are messy and full of contradictions".

The same interview covered the other thing he has been doing with the years off: training towards certification as a faith-neutral celebrant, conducting weddings, naming ceremonies and funerals. He was candid that he did not know whether Algorithm would be his last conventional tour, while insisting it was not a farewell.

Where things stand in September 2026

Speaking to The Echo on 24 July 2026, Porter put the tour at roughly fifty sold-out Irish venues, and described the difference in himself rather than in the material: "I feel much freer and much more able to just be myself and have a laugh." He credited Karl Spain and Fiona Looney for help with the show, and singled out three consecutive nights at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght as the run that felt most like home ground.

The tour ends on 9 October 2026 at Vicar Street, promoted by Aiken and pitched as a one-off: his old backing band, players who have worked with Tom Jones, Dickie Rock and Johnny Logan, joining him for the final night. Given where the career started in that building, and where it went in between, the choice of closing venue is not subtle — but it is earned. Six dates remain on sale.