Irish comedian Catherine Bohart: ‘I’m surprised my following is bigger in the US and UK than it is here’

Catherine Bohart has been welcomed into a club she didn’t know existed when she was growing up. It was hard to practise beforehand; the rules felt counterintuitive and she wasn’t sure it would be her jam.“Then, when I did it, honestly, it was euphoric, and I can’t pretend otherwise.”We’re talking about the Irish comedian’s August debut on Just a Minute, the longest-running panel show on BBC Radio 4, which gives players a subject to speak about for 60 seconds without hesitation, repetition or deviation. Being booked for it was “like winning the nerd Olympics”.On only her second show she managed to speak, uninterrupted by challenges from other contestants, about explaining the rules of board games for the whole minute, meaning she enjoyed what Sue Perkins, the host, described as “the Radio 4 version of crystal meth”.READ MOREThe institution that is Radio 4 – on which she has been a regular in recent years – fascinates Bohart. “It’s funny how it’s still the thing that impresses my girlfriend’s parents most. And it’s still the thing that gives you gravitas, I think, with a certain type of intellectual in the UK. But so many people listen to it, and I didn’t realise that at all. Radio 4 listeners are multiple, and they also have money and they come to shows.”Those stand-up shows are the reason for our chat. Borrowing Trouble, her new tour, has secured a string of positive notices, with tough-to-please British comedy critics hailing it as her funniest show yet. Dates have been added. Is it fair to say things are going well?“These are definitely the biggest rooms I’ve been doing, which is wild. The two-week run in Soho sold really well, so we’ve added a 1,000-seater in Walthamstow” – in east London – “which is crazy.”Bohart has opened for Joanne McNally at Vicar Street in Dublin, but she still can’t believe she’s doing the venue in her own right next week. “Whenever anyone says it to me, I go, ‘That can’t be right.’”Catherine Bohart performing at Soho Theatre in London on her Borrowing Trouble tour in September. Photograph: Jonny Ruff This is exciting, “deep end” stuff, and her instinct is to hesitate – in a way that would get her buzzed out on Just a Minute – and not get ahead of herself. “So Irish,” she says.Bohart grew up in Clonsilla, in west Dublin, the eldest of three children. Her father, as she spoke about in Immaculate, her 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut, is a Catholic deacon. She wanted to act, so 14 years ago, after studying French and history at Trinity College Dublin, she moved to London to attend Central, aka the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where she had to come up with a professional name for Spotlight, the UK casting directory, that no one else was using. Catherine Murphy, her real name, was already taken, and Doyle, her mother’s maiden surname, didn’t solve the problem.“The person I was seeing at the time was, like, ‘Oh, my grandmother has this cool name.’ I was, like, ‘That’s wicked. Can I use it?’ And they said sure. I wonder often if they mind, now that it’s going okay.”She started doing stand-up, initially as a hobby, in 2015. A breakthrough arrived in 2024 when her hour-long special Again, with Feelings was nominated for best show at the Edinburgh fringe. She self-funded its filming at the Soho Theatre in London, and it’s now on YouTube. “I felt it would be a waste not to capture it and have it somewhere, so that when I’m old I can look back at it and go, ‘Wasn’t I only gorgeous, and wasn’t I doing my best?’”Life has moved on for the 38-year-old since then. She has bought a flat in London with her girlfriend, the actor Ellen Robertson. The dream and reality of home ownership form one of the threads of Borrowing Trouble, in which she discusses her OCD and how she thought being in the perfect place would help her become a perfect person.“It’s about what I hoped owning a home would give me and what it’s provided instead,” she says. “I imagine myself an entirely new and different person if the circumstances change even a small amount. Like, if I think of January, I think, well, Catherine will be a totally, totally different person in January. I will change so dramatically. But I rarely change, that’s what I’ve discovered. And if I do, it’s at a glacial pace.”I mention to Bohart that I saw her doing a spot at the Comedy Store in London in June. (She won over the crowd in seconds.) Mixed-bill club gigs can be notoriously tricky, but she loves doing them, she says.“It’s interesting that we don’t do this with any other art form. If someone at work was, like, ‘Here, will we all go see music on Friday?’ no one would be, like, ‘Yeah,’ no questions asked. “With stand-up, everyone assumes stand-up will be what they expect it to be, when it often isn’t. But that’s the beauty of a mixed bill. If you don’t like someone, they’ll be off in 15 minutes. I love club gigs. I don’t know if that’s controversial. I adore them. I like that you have to introduce yourself and prove your worth.”After more than a decade of proving her worth through stand-up, some things have got easier, others harder.‘I am quite open about the fact that I find life a little bit hard, and that I’m a real worrier’“The second you’re doing well, you get put in a deeper pool. That’s kind of the nature of all work. Every time you think, okay, I got this, something more terrifying comes along.”Being a “stressy gal”, as Bohart calls herself in Again, with Feelings, feeds into her delivery, which comes across as both natural and well-honed.“I don’t know how to do a type of stand-up that isn’t open and vulnerable. I talk about that in this show, that it’s too late to change the brand. But the endeavour is making other people laugh and have a good time, not bringing your bad day to the stage. Some days that is easier than others. Some days I go, why didn’t I just write a bit about waiting rooms?”Often there’s nothing better than being up there, performing and interacting with the crowd. “I am quite open about the fact that I find life a little bit hard, and that I’m a real worrier, but that also means being on stage for me is often such a nice escape. When I am up there it’s hard to think about anything other than the people in front of me, and that’s quite lovely.”Bohart would like to do more acting – one of her few appearances on Irish television was in the RTÉ drama These Sacred Vows – but it’s a bigger challenge than stand-up, she says. “So far my hit rate on getting acting jobs is one every 13 years, so I’m not feeling like it’s going to happen any time soon. Maybe when I’m 51 I can look forward to being in another drama. Yeah, 51, 64, then 77. I doubt I’ll make to 90, but if I do, that’s, what, five acting jobs?”In the meantime she has established herself as a great booking across a raft of British TV comedy shows. Mock the Week is the one that makes her feel as if she’s “inside the television from my youth”, while QI is “heaven on earth” to do. “In the climate we’re in now, it’s hard to be anything other than grateful any time you get to do TV, because it’s a dying entity.”One recent appearance, on Ed Gamble’s new TLC show Unacceptable, seemed to get some pickup in Ireland, she says. “Often I’m surprised that my following is bigger in the States and in the UK than it is at home. I’m, like, ‘Where are my people?’ It’s really nice to see an increase in Irish people engaging with my stuff.”As listeners to David O’Doherty and Max Rushden’s What Did You Do Yesterday? podcast will know, Bohart’s days have also been occupied lately by research for Tonsil Hockey, her podcast with Olga Koch about the gay hockey sensation Heated Rivalry and all things “romance and smut-related”.It began when she and Koch couldn’t stop messaging each other about Heated Rivalry. “We thought we should make a podcast every day for seven days about it just to get it out of our systems. We genuinely thought we could then move on with our lives. It turns out that’s not how addictions work.”[ Patrick Freyne: ‘It’s important for ice hockey players to be clean!’ I jot down during Heated Rivalry’s shower sceneOpens in new window ]Bohart, who came out when she was 19, thinks her enthusiasm for shows such as Young Royals, her latest obsession, is “not disconnected from growing up in suburbia”, where she had the “huge privilege” of being bored as a teenager, fuelling her imagination, but didn’t know anyone who was out. “I think I’m partly obsessed with these young, queer people having romance because I didn’t.”The joy of talking about such shows on Tonsil Hockey is not confined to living vicariously through them, however. “It’s also the fact that the world is on fire. It’s just nice to think that there is a safe place where I’ll definitely get a happy ending. “That’s not the word I should have chosen. Clarification! Where there will be a happy ending.”Catherine Bohart is at the Comedy Club, Cork, on Thursday, November 5th; Vicar Street, Dublin, on Friday, November 6th; and Black Box, Belfast, on Sunday, November 8th