Kyla Cobbler

A separate room in Ballincollig

Kyla Cobbler grew up in Ballincollig, on the western edge of Cork city, dyslexic and dyspraxic in a school system that dealt with both by taking her out of the room. She sat exams apart from her classmates with a scribe writing down her answers, and she has said that separation still sits badly with her. Parent-teacher meetings produced the same verdict in different words — great craic, but she will not pass her exams. Her mother read to her and kept telling her otherwise.

What the classroom would not credit, the bars of Ballincollig did. Cobbler has put her sense of structure down to pub work and to watching a local storyteller called Paddy Brennan hold a room: when to stretch a story, when to drop it. She left Ireland at 18 and kept moving, through Australia, then seven years in Milan working in fashion, then Barcelona from February 2020.

A first open mic at 31

Comedy arrived late and sideways. Stuck in Barcelona, Cobbler started making Instagram sketches and talking into her stories about dating, drink and whatever had just happened to her, and the audience built on its own. The Irish comedian Mike Rice pushed her towards a stage, and in May 2021, aged 31, she did her first stand-up at the Comedy Clubhouse in Barcelona — a room she went on to bartend in.

Her own account of the early gigs is that the jokes were never the problem. Being looked at was. She has described the difficulty as being heard, using her voice and taking up space, and traced it back to a childhood in which a good girl was a quiet girl. The follower count made the bookings possible before the confidence had caught up: around 98,000 on Instagram in early 2024, roughly 300,000 by the summer of 2025, close to a million by 2026 against more than 250 million video views.

The live career moved at the same rate. She toured as part of the sell-out Viva La Vulva before her own hour existed, gave up a barista job to go full-time in the summer of 2024, and in February 2024 sold out Cork Opera House — a thousand people on their feet, which she has called the moment the work was validated. She went back for two nights there on 17 and 18 February 2025.

Gone Rogue, and the half-hour before the show starts

Gone Rogue is the debut hour and still the one most of her international audience is buying. It toured Ireland through 2024 and reached the Edinburgh Fringe for a short run at Underbelly, Cowgate, playing the Belly Laugh room at 4.15pm from 13 to 17 August 2025 at £13 to £14, with a British Comedy Guide recommendation attached to it.

The material is autobiographical and unguarded: Barcelona dating, a crush on a friend, the quiet power plays of a barbecue, how men and women are received differently on a comedy bill, ovulation, relationships conducted across two cultures. It is held together by callbacks and by self-deprecation rather than by a thesis.

What makes the hour unusual is how little of it is fixed. A five-star review of the Fringe run described roughly 35 minutes of unscripted work with the room before Cobbler turned to the written material, breaking off with the line that she had better start the show. The reviewer's summary — sharp, unscripted and about as predictable as rain in a Scottish summer — is close to what audiences report back. She also moves in and out of crowd work once the scripted section is running, so no two nights match.

Thirty-six nights, then an arena

The scale changed through 2025 and 2026. Two nights at Dublin's 3Olympia Theatre in spring 2025 and a full house at Leicester Square Theatre in London were followed by a 35-date UK tour and a 36-date Irish tour, both of which sold out. Demand in Australia and New Zealand pushed her dates from 11 to 22, including the Regal Theatre in Subiaco, Perth, on 21 April 2026 at 7pm.

On the back of the Irish sell-out she announced Dublin's 3Arena for Friday 26 February 2027, tickets €51.70 to €62.40, released on 20 March through Ticketmaster.ie and since gone from her own listings. The O2 in Belfast follows on Thursday 4 March 2027 at 8pm and still has tickets at the time of writing. Her 2026 festival run took in Latitude, the Glasgow International Comedy Festival, Greenwich Comedy Festival, Laughterama and the comedy gardens at Cambridge, Norwich and St Albans. She is represented by Off The Kerb Productions.

Television has largely stayed out of the way of the touring, with one exception that mattered: an appearance on RTÉ's The Tommy Tiernan Show in April 2025 that her own site still quotes audience reaction to.

A book, a move and a second hour

In December 2025 Cobbler moved from Barcelona to London with her fiancé Simon, a South African she has said she met in the third row of one of her own shows after giving up on the idea. She has also stopped drinking, on the grounds that it no longer fits where her life is and that she wants to feel everything.

Hachette Books Ireland and Brazen announced her memoir on 10 March 2026 and published it on 1 September as Happy, Thank You. More, Please.: How I Got Grateful, Stayed Mortified, and Learned to Trust the Universe, with an audiobook she reads herself. The title is a gratitude formula handed to her in her early twenties by a friend called Erica; speaking to the Irish Examiner on 30 August 2026 she set it against a Catholic upbringing that taught her to ask for less, and against years of depression and self-sabotage from her teens into her thirties.

The second hour, Not My Lemons, is already deep into its run and is built on the newer life — finding love, and the complications of family. It sold out four nights at The MAC in Belfast from 3 to 6 February 2026, three at the Courthouse in Bangor from 7 to 9 February, the Marketplace in Armagh on 10 February, the Strule Arts Centre in Omagh on 27 February, the Spiegeltent Festival in Wexford on 18 October 2026 and Knocknarea Arena in Sligo on 6 February 2027. It is the show the arena dates carry.