Stand-up comedians from Ireland

The most watched Irish comedy is often the most local. Bernard Casey works out of Portmagee, a village on the Kerry coast, and built a following of millions of video views from characters drawn off one parish, the gossip looking for a lift, the nephew home for the weekend, before he was selling out the Everyman in Cork and Vicar Street in Dublin. Conal Gallen, from Ballybofey in Donegal, sells something else again: comedy songs with titles like Horse It Into Ya Cynthia, a back catalogue of albums and DVDs, and theatre dates on both sides of the border. Neither man came up through a club and neither needs one.

The club route is there, and it is old. The Comedy Cellar opened in the cellar of the International Bar on South Wicklow Street in Dublin in 1988, started by Ardal O'Hanlon, Barry Murphy and Kevin Gildea, and it worked as the nursery for Tommy Tiernan, Dylan Moran and Des Bishop. Kilkenny added the Cat Laughs festival in 1994, where David O'Doherty went from sitting in the audience to topping the bill.

Working in English removes the translation problem and puts a competition problem in its place. Nothing written here needs subtitles, and nothing shelters the home market either. Joanne McNally went from Vicar Street runs and the London Palladium to headlining the 3Arena in Dublin. Jarlath Regan, from Kildare, moved to London and turned the oldest Irish subject of all into a format: An Irishman Abroad, a weekly interview podcast with Irish people who left, running since 2013.

The house delivery leans dry rather than loud. Michael Redmond, from Blackrock in Dublin, works deadpan under a mournful moustache and is known to a wider audience as Father Stone in Father Ted. David O'Doherty plays a small battery keyboard and took the if.comedy award in 2008 with it. Tadhg Hickey, from Cork, writes short political sketches and stage work about drink and family, and put the same material into a book.