Joanne McNally is every Irish woman’s best friend. The begrudgers won’t make a dent in her

Everyone I know refers to Joanne McNally simply as “Joanne”. If a Joanne comes up in conversation the assumption is that it’s Joanne McNally that’s being referred to, unless otherwise stated. I have a cousin called Joanne, and in a recent text conversation with a friend about a family trip I had to specify that “Cousin Joanne” was going, “not Joanne Joanne”. Joanne McNally is every woman in Ireland’s best friend. The comic jokes that when she’s doing gigs she’ll regularly get Instagram DMs from audience members letting her know what pub they’ll be in beforehand in case she wants to join them. The thing is, it feels plausible that she might join you, have four wines while debating if it was obvious that you left your scarf at a lad’s house purely so you’d have a reason to get back in touch, and make it on to the stage to deliver a stunning hour of comedy. When my best friend Joanne appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon this week it inspired a sense of national pride we haven’t felt since Jessie Buckley won the Oscar. We do so love to see Irish people doing well. Until, of course, it tips over into begrudgery. However, with the women of Ireland behind her, I can’t see the begrudgers making a dent in Joanne even though the higher you climb the harder they’ll try. And she really is climbing. On top of the Fallon appearance, she’s filming her show Pinotphile for a Netflix special in New York next month, the first stand-alone special on the streamer by an Irish comedian. My Therapist Ghosted Me, her podcast with Vogue Williams, draws millions of listeners every week. She’s in Bill Murray’s BBC golf show A Course Called Ireland (which begins this Friday) and also joined a star-studded cast on this year’s The Celebrity Traitors with the delightful air of someone who’s not in the Scottish castle to catch traitors so much as to enjoy an all-inclusive holiday. READ MOREThere was some scattered criticism aimed at Joanne when the Fallon appearance was announced, given the calls to boycott the American talkshow after Conor McGregor was interviewed and fawned over by Fallon in June of this year. Joanne was quick and assured with her response: “Imagine every single woman was expected to deplatform/silence/shrink herself from all and any public platform or professional opportunity cos it had previously had a bad man on it … he’s ruined enough women’s lives … I’ll be taking the opportunity.”[ Lena Dunham’s Girls will be glorious again as long as it sticks to this one principleOpens in new window ]In Prosecco Express, the show that preceded Pinotphile and ran for a record-breaking 78 nights at Vicar Street, Joanne used McGregor to help explain the class system in Ireland. At the top is Enya “in her panic room in Killiney”, the rest of us are in the middle and “down the bottom is Conor McGregor”. She joked during the show that there was always a twinge of fear that one of McGregor’s sisters might suddenly rise up out of the Vicar Street audience. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility given the numbers who attended. I ended up seeing Prosecco Express three or four times between the jigs and the reels. Joanne attracts an audience that’s about 96 per cent woman, 3 per cent gay men and a meek minority of straight husbands and boyfriends. She relishes in her female audiences, saying recently in interviews that a male comic had told her that she’s really “found her niche” as if women wanting to laugh is a “niche”. Could you really call four upcoming nights at the 3Arena and a Netflix special a niche? Bill Murray and Joanne McNally on A Course Called Ireland. Photograph: PA I do worry that if my best friend Joanne ever gets married or has kids, the women of Ireland will fall apart. Singledom and parenthood are common themes in her shows and she has spoken about freezing eggs or maybe having a “gayby” with her best friend. Of course, we’d all be thrilled for her if she chooses motherhood, but is she machine enough to raise a chic baby while doing a hundred nights in a row? Joanne’s shows have a distinct and gloriously deranged mams on tour vibe, but where will the mams go if Joanne joins their ranks? Who will they live vicariously through? Can a woman, even our beloved Joanne, really have it all? (Of course she can, don’t be ridiculous, she’ll just siphon off one of Vogue’s nannies.) A funny woman who has it all. How niche.