Neil Delamere: Divilment

He's a regular on TV panel and chat shows across the Irish sea. So it seems odd, given the strength of this intelligent and almost always hilarious hour-long riff on his country's national character, that Neil Delamere hasn't yet followed his compatriots Ed Byrne and Dara Ó Briain in achieving similar levels of success over here.  

Taking "divilment"—the Irish slang for mischievousness—as his theme, he leaps and bounds energetically through what it means to be Irish, offering up humorous vignettes as illustrative examples and produces new, imaginative takes on such well-worn Emerald Isle topics as alcoholism, RyanAir and the IRA. The last of these is a brilliant, cutting witticism about Republicans blowing up balloons in protest at the Queen's state visit to Ireland.

Able to find humour and hope in the darkest of corners—he even manages to make hilarious the initially alarming concept of a suicidal baby—Delamere personifies perfectly the irrepressible, cheeky sense of fun that he claims is so central to his homeland, even as it weathers one the most serious crises in its history.  

He perhaps relies a little too much on audience interaction, devoting what feels like a good 10 minutes or so to an Azerbaijani dancer in the front row who has caught his wandering eye, although he does at least manage to make some substantive links between each person and his material.

Whether the Irish really are intrinsically funnier than any other nation is up for debate, but on the strength of this performance, it seems entirely possible.