Forget bungy jumping – Irish comic Dara Ó Briain has much more refined plans for what to do during his first visit to New Zealand. Cityscape taps into the ‘Voice of Reason’ before his Christchurch show.

Your tour is called Voice of Reason and in the poster for it we see you bellowing into a megaphone – that’s an image for the age right there, isn’t it?

Voice of Reason seemed like a good general expression of the kind of stuff I normally do, and we had a very angry looking poster. It turns out later it’s subconsciously very similar to classic Soviet art of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. There’s one particular picture of a brave peasant woman shouting her support of the Soviet project, which this mimics exactly, and I’m not sure how we stumbled across that because there wasn’t a hidden message at all. It’s a weird echo, that poster.

This isn’t a problem but we use a screen behind us on stage and occasionally you go to theatres and they say we’ve only got our own screen but this is normally a cinema so you have to perform in front of a 100-foot tall version of your own face in an angry, shouting pose, and it looks like a fascist rally if you just took a snapshot of it. I’m standing in front of this giant image of myself – I don’t see it but I can see the fear in the audience’s face as I loom over them.

You do make for an imposing presence.

It is useful in comedy to have a physical presence on stage. You learn to stand in a particular way to dominate the audience. There is an element of wanting to be the person that all eyes are on. And it helps if you have an air of threat and menace, like a bouncer addressing the audience. It’s useful sometimes.

This is your first time in New Zealand – what have they told you about us?

Oh you know, it’s all orcs and rings being thrown into volcanoes and rugby balls and Cricket World Cup heroics. But I’d like to get past that, past the Lord of the Rings and the rugby. I’m a very good friend of Ed Byrne, who has been coming to New Zealand for 20 years and adores it and speaks nothing but highly of you. Ed has always said to me ‘you’ve got to go to New Zealand because they’ll bring you out bungy jumping and make you walk up a mountain’ and I’m like, whoa, I’m never going there. I’ve waited till I am too old to go bungy jumping, that has been a deliberate policy of mine to counteract your bizarre enthusiasm to bring people bungy jumping. So now at 47 I can justifiably say, no bungy jumping for me, thank you very much, can I please just enjoy the scenery like a normal tourist without you attaching some elasticated rope to my feet. So that’s my hope for New Zealand, that you don’t actually do that.

We do have some other things going on here, we have some fine wine and food.

As long as my trip features the word ‘Marlborough’ at some stage I’ll be very happy. Cloudy Bay would be delightful as well. There’s rather a number of really nice pinot noirs that I would like to work my way through that you are doing an excellent job on at the moment. I’m going to have a much more refined trip.

I’m looking forward to it enormously, it’s a new place to go. This year the new places I’ll go to are Estonia, Wellington, Christchurch, Auckland and Cologne. And I’m expecting the New Zealand gigs to be more enjoyable than the gig in Cologne and the gig in Estonia. We’ll have no language difficulties and no cultural things to overcome, I can just go straight in there and start telling jokes.

Any cities or venues that you particularly enjoy performing in?

Yes, I have a weird love affair with Norway and get on very well there. Not even just in Oslo but even up in Tromsø, which is in the Arctic Circle. I did my second show there earlier this year and we went especially early to see the Northern Lights and then do a gig and it’s just great to go up there when it’s under like four feet of snow. Scandinavia generally has been very, very nice. I can recommend Copenhagen as a place to go. But one of the great things about being a comedian is that you get to be curious about things, you get to want to find out something about places. So going to new places has kept this fresh. This is why I do places like Australia and New Zealand at the end of the tour, because it’s payoff for having done Finland and Dorking and Woking and Blackburn. Britain’s a lovely country but my God there’s a lot of it and there’s a lot of towns there and there’s a lot of time on the road. So I’ve got a little bit of Copenhagen to look forward to, a little bit of Christchurch and the promise of finding a new great place – that will make the journey down the M4 a lot more enjoyable.

What do you do to relax? Any hobbies?

I’m a huge sports fan, definitely soccer in particular and the Irish sport of hurling. I like attending the match, I like the sound of the crowd and people shouting, shouting at people far younger and fitter than I am, I find that very enjoyable. So in that regard I think myself and New Zealand will get on very well. But broadly I’ve got a young family so I can say movies and games and things like that but with kids you don’t get quite the amount of time to keep across stuff. Gaming I quite enjoy now and again, I quite enjoy a good video game.

Do you play those with the kids?

Yes we do. They’re quite young so the difficulty is getting the time to play one of the ones that Dad does, like God of War or one of the grown-up games, where you’re firing an axe at somebody. It’s a very small part of the day to do something as mammoth as that. There’s a lot of Mario in there – there’s a ton of Mario in there and a bit of FIFA and even a bit of Fortnite every now and again. They really have an endless supply of video games, which I am very in favour of.

You’ve written two children’s books that aim to popularise science – it seems like a cause close to your heart? Is science under attack

These aren’t sceptics books, these aren’t books to arm kids with information to fight anti-vaxxers, this is just exciting, just fun and exciting things. First I did a book on space, and then the microscopic world around us. Just for its wonder, and because it tickled my brain and the hope is that it will tickle other people’s brains. There was a point where I was doing a lot of fighting fights against psychics and astrologers and these kind of kooks but actually the hunger, the fire to do that sort of fight I don’t have it. It’s more the sheer beauty of the stuff, the science, rather than using it as a way to develop a cultural war. But yes I do think it is under threat, misinformation travels pretty fast these days and it’s a thing worth keeping, to get them early with rational thought and hope like hell it sticks. Today I found out my first book has been translated into Chinese, I’ve just got a copy of it in my hand, which is bizarre. When it was sold here it came out with a big picture of my face on it but they removed that for China, it would have been weird. 

What is one thing you hope audiences take away from your performances?

That they’ll get 80 percent of it, 70 percent of it – I talk very quickly and that is unlikely to change so I need them to come with me partly on this and then I will make some effort to slow it down for them. But frankly I’m a busy man. I’ve got stuff to do and there’s a lot of information I need to download into their heads in a period of time. At this stage it will literally be shows 170, 171 and 172, the shows I’m doing in New Zealand, so if it is not working by now, lads, then things have gone terribly wrong. It’s been road tested to within an inch of its life by this stage so frankly just enjoy me doing it because I’ll be enjoying it myself.

Dara Ó Briain – Voice of Reason
Christchurch Town Hall, September 23
ticketek.co.nz