Des Bishop

Fresh Meadows to Wexford

Desmond Ryan Bishop was born in London on 12 November 1975 and raised in Fresh Meadows, Queens, by an Irish-American mother and a British father. He attended St Francis Preparatory School. He has since spoken openly about drinking and drug use that started when he was twelve, and about being sent to Ireland at fourteen as a result — first to St Peter's College, Wexford at sixteen, then to Blackrock College in Dublin for his Leaving Certificate. He got sober at nineteen and took a BA in English and history at University College Cork.

Comedy came out of that second country rather than the first. He started at Dublin's International Comedy Cellar, the room set up by Ardal O'Hanlon, Kevin Gildea and Barry Murphy, and the Irish circuit became the place where he learned to perform. His brother Aidan is also a comedian; between them they run the International Comedy Club. A diagnosis of testicular cancer in 2000 went into the act, as did the death of his father from lung cancer in February 2011 and his mother Eileen's death on 19 March 2019.

The television years

What turned a club act into a household name in Ireland was documentary television rather than stand-up. The Des Bishop Work Experience, broadcast on RTÉ Two in 2004, put him into minimum-wage jobs around the country — Abrakebabra, Superquinn, the Aqua-dome, a hotel in Dublin — and built stand-up out of the experience. Joy in the Hood followed in 2006, with Bishop coaching people in Irish towns and estates to write and perform their own material.

Then came the language projects, which remain the oddest and most durable thing about his career. For In the Name of the Fada, broadcast in 2008 and an IFTA winner, he moved to Connemara for a year to learn Irish well enough to perform a full stand-up set in it; a by-product was Léim Thart, an Irish-language version of House of Pain's Jump Around. He repeated the trick in Mandarin, performing in China under the name Bi Hansheng, turning up on Chinese dating shows, and releasing a China special in 2014. In 2017 he took part in the first Irish series of Dancing with the Stars, partnered with Giulia Dotta, and went out in week six in eighth place.

Records, a book, and starting over in American rooms

The recorded work runs back to Live at Vicar Street in 2003, followed by Live in 2005, Fitting In in 2006, Tongues in 2007 and Desfunctional in 2009 — the arc of a comic filling Irish theatres. In 2011 Penguin Ireland published My Dad Was Nearly James Bond, the memoir built around his father's brief career as a male model and actor, which he had already toured as a show.

After the 2014 China hour he made a decision that cost him most of a decade of momentum: he would write for American audiences. Irish comedy had trained him as a storyteller, and the American clubs wanted something faster and harder. He has said flatly that touring the United States made him a better comedian, and that the breakthrough came when he stopped resisting how American crowds read him — as a guy from Queens.

The first fruit of that was Of All People, released on YouTube on 16 January 2024 and re-released through 800 Pound Gorilla Media on 22 October 2024, with an album version on streaming. It drew on Queens, Ireland and China at once: the 1980s, aging parents, mental health, memorising phone numbers, and the gap between being a short man and behaving like a tall one.

Bridge & Tunnel

His seventh special, and second written specifically for America, was filmed at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village — the New York room he has made his base. Bridge & Tunnel premiered on Hulu on Friday 26 June 2026 and went out free on YouTube on 10 July 2026. Mike Lavin directed; Bishop's wife, the comedian Hannah Berner, is an executive producer.

The hour is Gen X nostalgia with the sentiment taken out: a 1980s childhood in Queens, boarding school in Ireland, dating in middle age, and a sustained run on deciding not to have children. The title is the point — a term for outer-borough people arriving in Manhattan, reclaimed as a statement of where the material comes from.

Bishop and Berner married on 13 May 2022 at his house in the Hamptons, having become engaged in February 2021. They have co-hosted the call-in podcast Burning in Hell, and he has described their working relationship as deliberately bounded — she is the one who tells him which bits will travel on social media, not the one who edits his hour. Her own special, None of My Business, came out in the same period.

Where he stands in October 2026

Bishop is fifty and in the strongest commercial position of his American career, though it still looks different on each side of the Atlantic. In the United States he is working club rooms: the Improv in Irvine on 4 October 2026, Helium in St Louis on 14 October, Helium Indianapolis on 15 October, Alpharetta on 2 December and Zanies in Nashville on 3 December. Beyond that the touring act is called Grey Area, and it has begun to graduate to theatres — the Wilbur in Boston on 30 January 2027 sold out, and of the two shows added for 13 March 2027 the evening performance has gone as well, at $35–$45 a ticket.

November 2026 takes him to Australia, with five nights at the Comedy Store in Sydney on 8, 9, 10, 16 and 17 November and dates in Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

The one setback this year was in Dublin. Since 2025 Bishop has co-hosted the weekly podcast The Bishop Exchange with John Bishop — no relation, the joke being the comparison of notes from either side of the water — now past ninety episodes. The pair booked Vicar Street for live versions on 6 and 7 September 2026; John Bishop broke his ankle, could not travel, and both nights were cancelled with automatic refunds. Bishop has also said he is filming a television project in Ireland, which would be his first substantial return to the format that made him there.