Comedian Dara Ó Briain on the family surprise behind his new show

Dara Ó Briain is the quick-thinking, quick-talking Irish comedian who has reached lofty heights — both career-wise and in terms of his physical stature — globally.

The 54-year-old is perhaps best known for hosting hugely popular UK TV shows including Mock the Week, Robot Wars, Three Men in a Boat, and Dara and Ed's Great Big Adventure.

But Ó Briain, who was once a "nerdy" university student studying mathematical physics, has also fronted science-related fare such as Stargazing Live and Dara Ó Briain Meets Stephen Hawking, and penned several science books for kids.

Adopted as a baby, the comic has in recent times found a rich, and sometimes emotional vein for his storytelling in deciding to track down his birth mother, who he met just before the COVID-19 lockdowns.

His current stand-up show, Re:Creation, digs into the tale of meeting his biological father, who wasn't expecting a mystery son to show up — and no doubt, definitely not one who was a famous comedian.

When did you first realise you could make people laugh?

Oh God, it was a university thing. I stood in front of people to do debating, which is a big thing in Irish universities, and got a laugh on some joke I did about how the law faculty had moved to a different building. I mean, that's how low-stakes this was, and I got a laugh. It was a genuine jolt of, "Oh wow, OK, that was nice", and so it came from nowhere. I mean, I was a nerdy kid. I'd like to think my friends found me amusing, but I wasn't a class clown.

It was a rush of adrenaline, and I remember it being like a drug. And then you chase the high, and it ends up that you need to do two hours in [Melbourne's] Hamer Hall to get the same high.

When you decided to become a comedian, was it easy from the start? Or did it take years to hone your craft?

It definitely would have taken years to find my actual voice.

It takes a while to get good, but you'd have given up if you weren't getting something back off the audience, so I was already getting laughs and enjoying it. But it definitely bumped up a level.

I think there's a point about seven years in where I found, really imperceptibly, I should lean into talking quickly and waving my hands around.

Has your comedy changed much over the years?

Comedians are a bit like different types of runners, as in, are you a sprinter or are you a long-distance runner? What are you actually built for? 

It's obvious physically whether you should be a sprinter. But with comedy, you have to learn: am I a storyteller or am I short-burst one-liners, or what's my weapon of choice?

I think it's fairly safe to say I fall into storytelling now. I'm made for the theatre show … I will take you on a journey, and I will set things up that will pay off an hour, an hour-and-a-half later. So I know how to craft that, and how to craft the rhythms of a big show.

I always wonder how comedians remember an entire routine. How do you it?

It's weird. You remember the links between the bits. You write down key words, you never write down the whole thing. Writing the whole thing out feels like pinning a butterfly; it feels like I'm going to kill it by specifying the exact words. 

This is where it becomes like a muscle memory. You just get used to saying over and over again. But it does mean that you look back over the notes for any previous show, and they're just a series of words.

There was one I did about three years ago where one of the key words was "nun's chocolate", and I spent a week trying to remember what "nun's chocolate" meant.

Your current stand-up show is about meeting your biological father. Was your existence a surprise to him?

Yes, he did not know anything about it. I can't tell you too much because there's a whole thing with the show. There's a rug pull and there's surprises.

But I can definitely tell you that he did not know. So it is about contacting somebody out of the blue, yeah, and going, "You are a father and I am the child you had."

The joke is that the previous show (about finding and meeting his birth mother) was like my version of the film Philomena because the previous show had sadness and anger. It was impossible not to think of it in terms of a young pregnant woman in Dublin in the 1970s, how awful that would have been, and how little support there was, all that kind of stuff.

So it touched on all these societal things, and the fact that the Irish government stopped you from getting all your information for years, and that was that story. 

This show is like my version of the film Elf (the comedy film starring Will Ferrell, in which a human boy is raised by Santa's elves). 

So it's not quite as emotional as your last show?

I mean, there's some emotion to it, but I think it's a nice journey. It's a very enjoyable journey for the audience to go on. It becomes slightly different when you do it 150 times — not that you beat the emotion out of it, but, like, it is a story I tell now.

My birth mother was at the show in Galway a week-and-a-half ago. There's also a lot of cousins in Ireland, so there's a lot of cousins that have been to the show. And there's points where they'd just appear at the stage door.

Have you found you share a sense of humour with any of your biological family?

The weird thing about the adoption journey for me was it didn't answer any nature/nurture questions. There was no kind of, "But you're all exactly the same height."

The one I always had for a long time was I'm really into maths and science, and I was really, really maths-y when I was a kid, and there was nothing in my adoptive family, nothing. Though there is some physical resemblance. 

I come down on the side of nurture in this debate. I think we overestimate (the role of nature), and I think we like to look for the patterns.

You've hosted or appeared on so many TV shows, particularly in the UK and Ireland. Has there been a stand-out for you?

Of the stand-out ones, we did The Panel (a spin-off of the Australian version) in Ireland for 10 years, and that was the most fun because it was just like some friends at a table talking.

And then at the same time, I was doing Mock the Week, the show for which I would be better known — that's the one that'll be on my tombstone, or will be the first line of my obituary, unless I do something terribly wrong.

But Mock the Week is very formal, with rounds and points … it's very British television to have a structure to it, and this team and that team.

I would do that on a Thursday, and then at the weekend I'd fly back to Ireland and we'd just sit around the table for The Panel; it was really relaxed. It was a really good excuse to meet up with some friends in Dublin once a week, talk shit and then go out.

Do you ever have an off day or a time when you just can't think on your feet?

Yeah, there are times you're tired, times when it's the first time you've done the show in a while. You can be rusty, you can be jet-lagged.

And there's times where somebody goes, "Well, I'm a, you know, a phlebotomist," and you go to your brain, "OK, brain, what are you gonna give me?" And your brain goes, "I've got nothing on this. I've got absolutely nothing for you."

So you do go to like a vending machine in your head. You're shaking the vending machine, going, "Could you throw me any joke at all about phlebotomy?" And your brain is going, "I'm looking, I'm looking." Your brain is in an office somewhere scanning through files for phlebotomy, phlebotomy, phlebotomy. What the hell is phlebotomy?

What occupies your mind when you're not on tour? I hear you're into astrophotography.

I did a lot more of that during COVID because it was a complete break. I bought an escalating series of telescopes and attached again a more complex series of cameras to them. And then the cameras get more specialised. I went deep into it.

But the results were magic at the end of it because you get all these photographs, each of which takes six minutes to do, of something you cannot see with the naked eye. You stick them on top of each other, so they come into one image, and then you tweak it, and suddenly out of that pops a galaxy, like Andromeda or something.

I'm also learning Spanish. I'm in a really nice phase of life where I realise I have time. You hustle, hustle, hustle furiously, and then you get to a point where you go, OK, I've still got little-ish kids, so I'm still in that game, but there's also the sense of the things I do don't have to pay off immediately.

Weirdly, it's not like I've got to 54 and thought, "Oh my God, I'm against the clock now." When you're 22, you're going, "Jesus Christ, I'll be 23 next year." Relax, you've got so much time.

It's insane because my parents are 90 and 95. Unfortunately, not the birth parents, the adoptive parents, so it's no use to me genetically, but there's still that sense of going, "Oh, there's way more time we have here than you think."

Dara Ó Briain will perform at Hamer Hall in Melbourne on November 9, Fortitude Musical Hall in Brisbane on November 10 and the State Theatre in Sydney on November 11.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.