On tour
Every date the ticketer lists, worldwide · venue time
The profile · researched 23 October 2026
Taking Tangents: the Dubliner who learned stand-up to cure stage fright
David Nihill took up comedy as a workaround for a fear of public speaking, wrote a bestselling book about the method, and is now described as the biggest-selling Irish comedy act in the United States. His Taking Tangents tour reached Cork in October 2026 and lands in Sydney in November.
Dublin, dyslexia, and a fundraiser that went sideways
Nihill was born and raised in Dublin and left at 22. His mother comes from Limerick and his father from Clare, which made his first Limerick booking, at the Lime Tree Theatre on 3 September 2026, a late arrival in family terms rather than a random tour stop.
School was difficult. He grew up with dyslexia and struggled academically before working out, in college, how his own brain handled information; reading became a habit afterwards rather than a chore. He studied business, and that qualification, not comedy, set the first two decades of his working life. A spell with Enterprise Ireland and a run of international business roles took him out of Ireland for good. He moved to the United States in 2005 and has lived and worked in twelve countries, visiting more than eighty.
Comedy arrived as a problem-solving exercise. He wanted to raise money for a friend who had suffered a spinal cord injury, and found he was too frightened of public speaking to stand up and ask. His fix was to attack the fear head-on by performing live comedy, which is an unusual order of operations: most comedians are performers who discover they are funny, rather than nervous speakers who discover a stage is the cheapest available therapy. The business background did not go to waste either. He built FunnyBizz, a company and conference where comedians teach executives and business leaders how to use humour in their own communication.
The book, and the method underneath it
Before the specials there was a book: "Do You Talk Funny?: 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (and Funnier) Public Speaker". It takes the structural tricks of stand-up — setup, misdirection, the callback, the economy of a tight punchline — and applies them to boardrooms and keynote slots. That book is still the reason a sizeable share of his audience knows the name at all, which gives his crowds an unusual mix: comedy-club regulars sitting beside people who first encountered him as a presentation coach.
What he does on stage, though, is deliberately not the American model. He has said he has no interest in the five-minute joke built like a machine, and works instead from the Irish habit of simply reporting what happened: "This thing happened to me and I think that's funny. Let me just repeat it." He has also offered the clearest defence of the approach going: "That's how Irish people tell stories. In Ireland, the crazier the story is, the more likely it is to be true." The material shifts from show to show and he keeps it free-form and unfiltered rather than locked to a script.
The competitive record backs up the instinct. He won the San Francisco Comedy Competition in 2018 — a contest whose earlier finalists include Robin Williams and Ellen DeGeneres — and was runner-up in The Moth's US GrandSLAM, the storytelling competition that rewards exactly the kind of long, shaggy, true narrative he favours.
Three specials, and a set built out of books
His first special, "Documented", was recorded for Dry Bar Comedy in 2019 and leaned on the immigration-paperwork years. "Cultural Appreciation" followed in 2023 and became his breakout online, passing 2.5 million views on YouTube and pulling in the audience numbers that now underwrite the touring.
The third, "Shelf Help", was recorded in 2025 and is the one his own billing calls award-winning. It is also the most structurally interesting thing he has done: a set that folds reading recommendations into the stand-up, turning the books he got to late because of dyslexia into the spine of a career-spanning travelogue. It is a conceit that could easily collapse into a lecture, and the reason it does not is that the books are the excuse rather than the subject.
The reach has grown fast enough that his own tour copy cannot keep pace with it. Listings for his Philadelphia date in March 2026 claimed a social following above two million and more than 500 million video views. By the Limerick announcement in late August 2026 the figures quoted were 2.5 million followers and over a billion views, while the Sydney billing settled on 800 million. Whichever number is current, the trajectory is the point: this is a touring act built on video distribution rather than television exposure.
Standing in late 2026: the biggest Irish seller in America, and the material that empties rooms
Across more than twenty years of emigration Nihill has become, by the description now attached to him, the biggest-selling Irish comedy act in the United States. Part of that is festival work: he plays the large Irish-American events, where crowds can run to 100,000 people, and a good deal of his best material comes from the gap between those audiences and the country they think they are celebrating. Third- and fourth-generation Irish-Americans, he has pointed out, hear that Ireland had a half-Indian gay leader, or has just elected its third female president, and assume the punchline is still coming.
He has also stopped treating his American stages as politically neutral ground. For roughly the past two to three years he has worked Palestine and Gaza into the US shows, and has been blunt about the cost: he calls it "a room-turning issue if you talk about anything along those lines". The consequences have been concrete rather than theoretical — posters for his shows vandalised, audience members walking out mid-set. He has kept the material in anyway, which is worth noting about a comic whose commercial base is precisely the Irish-American circuit most likely to object.
Against that, he is candid about what emigration costs him. What he misses about Ireland is the ordinary conversational density of the place, set against the silence and distance of life in California, where he is now based.
Taking Tangents on the road
The current show, "Taking Tangents", followed a sold-out world tour and is named after exactly what it does. The billing promises cultural observation, failed attempts at learning languages, the occasional international drinking session, and the standpoint of what he calls a mildly confused immigrant — and the digression is the structure, not a failure of it.
2026 has been a heavy year. A Southern California run took in Irvine, Pasadena and Los Angeles between 13 and 17 March; the Philadelphia date at the Kimmel Center fell on 8 March, billed 18 and over; Healdsburg's Raven Performing Arts Theater followed on 22 March with tickets at $29 to $44. The Irish leg brought the Limerick debut on 3 September at €29.50 and The Everyman in Cork on Saturday 3 October at 8pm. Next up is the southern hemisphere: Just For Laughs Sydney, at the Factory Theatre in Marrickville, on Sunday 22 November at 7pm.
Staging is close to nothing, by design. He describes himself as someone who knows how to talk rather than a performer, and he barely moves across the stage — no roaming, no props doing the work. The listings checked for the current run bill him as a solo evening, with no support act named.
The show, now
"Taking Tangents" is a solo evening with almost no staging: Nihill works from a near-fixed spot, barely crossing the stage, and has said he thinks of himself as someone who knows how to talk rather than a performer. The shape is a chain of true stories that wander before they land — his parents, his own misadventures abroad, failed language-learning, the occasional international drinking session, and the view from what his billing calls a mildly confused immigrant. The set is not fixed; he keeps it free-form and shifts it show to show, and in his US dates he has for the past two to three years included material on Palestine and Gaza that he openly describes as a room-turning issue, having had posters vandalised and audiences walk out over it. In front of Irish-American festival crowds the reliable engine is the distance between their idea of Ireland and the current one — a half-Indian gay former leader, a third female president, both of which land as punchlines before people realise they are facts. Venue billings run 18-plus in the US, and the listings for the current run name no support act. Dates in 2026 included the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia on 8 March, a Southern California run from 13 to 17 March, Healdsburg on 22 March at $29–$44, his first Limerick show on 3 September at €29.50, and The Everyman in Cork on 3 October; Just For Laughs Sydney brings him to the Factory Theatre in Marrickville on 22 November 2026.
Researched from limerickpost.ie · irishexaminer.com · pressdemocrat.com · yahoo.com · ensembleartsphilly.org · justforlaughs.sydney
Pictures
The ticketer's photographs
