Deconstructing Comedy Is Simple Maths, Says Dara O'Briain

When Dara O'Briain learns he has a fan on the other end of the line, it's not quite the usual response you'd expect. "Oh, thank you very much! How the fuck do you know who I am, then?" he laughs.

Phoning from London, the Irish stand-up and TV presenter is incredibly thankful for the support, even if he's not quite used to global notoriety yet.

"You know, with the international sales of things, now we have to write into the tour the nine dates I'll do in Norway, for example." He says of his recent fame, "I'll do Moscow, to locals, and I did Switzerland last weekend. And this is all very strange to us; we're kind of going 'Well, what is it? What material have they seen?' for one thing. There's a danger that they'll go 'No, no! That was on last week! We get BBC so therefore, we just saw that' And you're going 'Fuck, I've gotta change that!' So it's a blessing in a way. It is a blessing but it has this sort of side-curse that you don't know what people have seen, you know?"

"When I was in Australia last, I am such a better comic than I was. God, how I got away with the shit I was doing back then."

As host of Mock The Week, a regular on the likes of QI and The Graham Norton Show and a prolific comedic talent, O'Briain is raring for his upcoming Aus tour, which just so happens to hit our shores during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. "That's not a coincidence." He happily asserts. "It'll be a huge blast because it means that 200 of my closest friends will also be in town, so that's quite nice.

"And looking back on it, when I was in Australia last, I am such a better comic than I was. God, how I got away with the shit I was doing back then. Just, like, six tours better than I was. If you fell for it back then, fuck me you're gonna lap this shit up."

Since being in our country last, O'Briain's comedy career has skyrocketed, leading to but one particular drawback: "When you're touring, the disadvantage to doing well in comedy is that you end up isolating yourself a bit. Because you're doing big ol' tours, you don't see other comics doing shows. Because you write your show yourself, and then you go off and do it, just you, no shared stages, just you on your own. And so the chance now to go to Melbourne and see other people do shows is just a blessing. You get to go 'Ahh, that's what's happening now. That's what people are into now. That's what people are changing and what the new kids are doing. Great.' And then you nick their stuff. You steal their stuff and then you do it on television before they do and therefore you own it!"

As well as touring his new stand-up show, O'Briain will present a special Australian edition of Stargazing Live, the Astronomy-based program he co-presents with astrophysicist Professor Brian Cox. "We decided that we had to do something kind of special, and nothing is happening in the sky above the UK this year. So we're going to go there because Saturn is really good, we'll get the Milky Way and we'll get the southern skies, which, obviously, is a completely different sky."

This isn't just a side hobby for O'Briain, either. Before turning to comedy, he studied maths and physics at university, and has held a passion for the subjects with his edutainment programs Dara O'Briain's Science Club and School Of Hard Sums. More recently, however, these multiple strings to his bow have been able to cross over.

"It's become the case that people will kind of let me indulge, and I'm allowed to do nerdier routines than I would have done when I was in the clubs because people know that this is my background," he says. "And people are okay with it, you know? If it's written well, performed well and it's funny, you can do a routine about helium depletion and how we're running out of the lightest molecules in the universe." He says there's science in everything, even comedy. "People do bits where it's 'Trump says this so therefore, therefore and therefore' - You do that in maths all the time. It's called Reductio Ad Absurdum, where you take an initial assumption and bring it to some sort of contradiction, and that shows that the assumption was incorrect. Comedy does that all the time." O'Briain continues, "It's the same logical trick, just bringing something to a ridiculous conclusion. So a good argument and being quite irate about something, an audience will follow that quite easily."

While being branded as nerdy may not be everyone's cup of tea, O'Briain doesn't mind being a little boxed in. "I may be putting a bit of a feeling over myself," he explains, "and it's very spacious and I'm doing grand, but it may be that I'll never quite be that wholly mainstream act because I have a tendency to get nerdy. But now I am so in that sector of the market, with my passions and my interests, so I can't complain."