Des Bishop Uses Humor to Bridge Cultural Divides at WHBPAC

If you ever wanted a better example of fish-out-of-water syndrome, look no further than Des Bishop. The Irish American comedian is a Flushing native left for Ireland at the age of 14 to attend an all-boys prep school after nearly flunking out of St. Francis Preparatory School in Fresh Meadows. Having spent his development years in the Emerald Isle, Bishop not only became a noted stand-up performer in his adopted country but starred in two separate reality series where he learned Gaelic and Mandarin Chinese with the intention of doing full stand-up acts in those respective languages. These are among the anecdotes the 49-year-old performer will be sharing along with healthy doses of his Queens childhood when he hits the stage at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center.

“This show is very nostalgic I have to say,” he said. “I focused really hard on my New York childhood because I never really explored it [as] I lived in Ireland most of my life. Irish people don’t identify with that stuff. I’d say 70 percent of the show is nostalgia.”

The overseas forays that led to Bishop becoming a polyglot started with the 2008 show In the Name of the Fada, which saw the comedian living with a family in the West of Ireland learning Irish from scratch and eventually performing a 60-minute stand-up comedy routine in that language. Fast forward to 2013 when Bishop lived in Beijing to learn Mandarin over the span of 18 months, eventually becoming fluent, hitting the stand-up stage and yielding the series Breaking China. When asked which language was the more difficult undertaking, surprisingly it was learning Gaelic.

“I think learning Mandarin in China is almost an easier undertaking,” he explained. “I know that’s hard for some people to fathom because Chinese seems so difficult. Living in Beijing, you’re just so much more exposed to the language. Even though I was living in an Irish-speaking area learning Gaelic, everyone can speak English, so they’re kind of doing you a favor tolerating you suffering through the Irish language because they know they can communicate perfectly with you in English if they wanted to. Whereas in China, 80 percent of the time you’re dealing with people that can’t speak English, so you’re just immersed all the time.”

The eldest of three brothers, the self-described “aggressively observational” comic cut his teeth in the ‘80s enthralled by the likes of Eddie Murphy, Dom Irrera and countless comedians he saw on shows like A&E’s Night At the Improv. But one of the largest inspirations for Bishop was his late father Mike, an Irishman and former actor/model who eventually passed away from terminal cancer. That inspiration carried over to My Dad Was Nearly James Bond, a one-man show that later became a 2011 memoir and documentary. The seeds were planted from a true family story about how the elder Bishop was briefly considered to play 007 in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. For Bishop the younger, the story was far more than being about a missed opportunity at global fame.

“The Bond producers definitely came to look at my father doing an Irish play on the West End called Sive by John B. Keane because I ended up meeting a guy that acted in the play with him and actually wrote an article about it for The Irish Post back in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s called ‘The Irishman That Was Nearly James Bond,’” Bishop said. “In my later years with my father, I discovered he had this horrific childhood. I always thought that I would do a one-man show on the legend of James Bond and my dad’s regret about his acting career versus his heroic survival as a child from abusive parents. The [selfless] sacrifice of fatherhood versus the sort of surface journey of fame and the regrets my father had for giving up modeling and acting to raise us.”

The Westhampton show is a homecoming for Bishop who came Stateside for East End vacations dating back to his early teen years. It’s a time he looks back at fondly.

“We had a place we’d come out to and there were a lot of people I became friendly with who I met on the beach,” he recalled. “I had quite idyllic summers because of that. I was a teenager and there were these twenty-something/thirty-something people living the not-having-kids-life. They kind of adopted to me into their gang, but they were not Queens people. I remember it being my first time having people help me understand you don’t have to be a tough guy. I always credit the beach in Westhampton with gentrifying me in a good way and not a bad way.”

Des Bishop will be appearing on Thursday, August 14 at Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, 76 Main Street, Westhampton Beach. For more information, visit whbpac.org or call 631- 288-1500.