Joanne McNally

Killiney, PR and a late start

Joanne McNally was born on 7 May 1983 in County Roscommon and adopted as a baby by a family in Killiney, south County Dublin. She read English and Sociology at University College Dublin, then spent her early twenties as a publicist, working alongside the media personality James Kavanagh, before a year in Australia and a move into the mental-health charity sector. She has spoken openly about living with bulimia during that period, and the eating disorder later became the raw material for her first solo show.

Comedy arrived comparatively late. In 2014 she appeared in the director Una McKevitt's show Singlehood, and with PJ Gallagher she co-created Separated at Birth, a two-hander about adoption that sold out Vicar Street in May 2015. That autumn she was hired as a co-host of RTÉ2's Republic of Telly, a job she held from October 2015 to June 2016. In 2016 came Bite Me, a one-woman show about her eating disorder that earned a Dublin Fringe nomination for Best Performance. Wine Tamer followed, taking her to the Edinburgh and Adelaide Fringes.

The Prosecco Express and the podcast that built the audience

The show that changed her scale was The Prosecco Express, launched in 2022 and still touring more than two years later. It sold more than 210,000 tickets across the UK, Ireland, Australia, Dubai, Canada and the United States, played multiple nights at the London Palladium and Hammersmith Apollo, and ran for an unprecedented 78 performances at Dublin's Vicar Street. Ticketmaster Ireland named it Comedy Event of the Year.

Running alongside it was the engine that filled those rooms. My Therapist Ghosted Me, the podcast she has co-hosted with Vogue Williams since April 2021, now has more than 300 episodes and around 2.5 million monthly listeners. It was named Podcast Champion at the 2023 British Podcast Awards and took the Spotlight Award at the 2023 Irish Podcast Awards. The podcast has toured as a live show in its own right, playing New York, Sydney and Dubai and five sold-out nights at Dublin's 3Arena, which is why a solo arena date never looked far-fetched.

Television filled in the rest of the picture. She created, wrote and presented the TV3 documentary Baby Hater, appeared on Channel 4's The Big Fat Quiz of Everything in April 2022, fronted Joanne & Vogue's Sex Drive on E4 in September 2023, and finished second in series 17 of Taskmaster in 2024. For BBC Sounds she has made two series of Joanne McNally Investigates, one asking who replaced Avril Lavigne and the other whether Furbys spied on their owners.

Pinotphile: the show and where the name came from

Pinotphile is the follow-up to The Prosecco Express and has been on the road since 2025. Speaking to Stylist in January 2025, she explained the title came from a viral Peloton clip in which an instructor ejected a rider whose username was a pun on paedophile, which prompted her own deep dive into wine-based wordplay. She also admitted that getting back to writing after two years of performing a finished show was hard work, and that returning to club stages was what got the new hour moving. She mines friends' dating stories as well as her own, since a single woman's personal experience, she said, only stretches so far.

The material is about singledom in her forties, situationships, rejection, revenge fantasies and frenemies. Reviewing the show at the King's Theatre in Glasgow on 10 September 2025, The List's Jay Richardson described routines on boozing and pill-popping in her twenties, infidelity in past relationships, facing the menopause while single and drunk online shopping, and credited the show with an entertaining, hard-won authenticity. He found one drunk-shopping routine less distinctive but said the hour otherwise overflowed with quality, with McNally masterfully assured in front of an overwhelmingly female crowd cheering and raising glasses.

The Irish Times sent Niamh Browne to the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin and gave the show four stars on 9 January 2026. She described a raucous, mostly female audience, jokes about men, break-ups, day drinking and the friends McNally has lost to wellness, and a finale in which the comedian rides a mobility scooter with a bar cart and glow-in-the-dark props. Her verdict was that McNally, exuberant and brazen, delivers everything she promises, with no lulls, although one joke about Britney Spears's conservatorship struck her as punching down.

2026: arenas, Netflix and a TLC panel show

The tour went to Australia in April 2026, playing the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne on 7 and 8 April, Brisbane Powerhouse on 19 April, the Regal Theatre in Perth on 22 April and Sydney's Enmore Theatre on 26 April. Quotes carried on that tour's publicity included a five-star Time Out Australia notice calling her an effervescently electric storyteller and a four-star Edinburgh Reporter review.

By then she had become the first Irish comedian to sell out Dublin's 3Arena, with 5 December 2026 followed by a second sold-out night on 12 December. In August 2026 a third date, 4 December, was added, with general sale opening on 20 August. Her management's announcement put the expected audience across the three Dublin nights at more than 20,000, and noted that she had already sold out more than 23 performances at the 3Olympia and 11 nights at London's Eventim Apollo on the Pinotphile run. Two more Apollo dates follow on 16 and 17 December 2026.

The Netflix deal was signed in July 2026. Pinotphile will be filmed in New York City later in 2026 and released globally in 2027 as what her management describes as the first standalone Netflix comedy special by an Irish comedian. On 5 July 2026 she also began a run as a team captain, opposite Richard Ayoade, on Unacceptable, a six-part TLC comedy panel show hosted by Ed Gamble, which has since been renewed for a second series. She has also been announced for the second series of The Celebrity Traitors on BBC One this autumn, and a collection of essays, Femme Feral, is published by Sandycove.

The view from the comedian

Interviewed by the PA news agency in a piece RTÉ ran on 2 July 2026, McNally, then 43, said she felt very lucky but had not expected the career to grow as fast as it has. Her own explanation was blunt: she had not been messing around. She moved to London during the pandemic to pursue the work, and described the cost in the same breath: no partner, no kids, no dog, this is all she does. There was, she added, still a lot more to do.

It is a career built in an unusual order. The podcast audience came before the arena, the eating-disorder show came before the dating material, and the Netflix hour arrives after the tour that earned it has already sold out the biggest room in Ireland three times over. The 3Arena dates in December and the New York taping will decide what the next show has to live up to.