{"id":361238,"date":"2026-03-23T18:05:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T18:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/361238\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T18:05:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T18:05:09","slug":"the-comedian-radiates-charm-and-joy-in-upbeat-show-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/361238\/","title":{"rendered":"The comedian radiates charm and joy in upbeat show \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aisling Bea: Older Than JesusVicar Street, Dublin\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606 <\/p>\n

\u201cJesus was someone I looked up to a lot growing up,\u201d Aisling Bea<\/a> jokes at Vicar Street<\/a> on Sunday night, referring to the picture of Christ that hung in her home.<\/p>\n

The line comes from Older Than Jesus, her new show, in which the comedian tackles themes of growing up in Catholic Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. Older Than Jesus is not a mournful lament, however; rather, it radiates joy.<\/p>\n

Bea talks about being an altar boy \u2013 \u201cI was always a woman in a male-dominated field,\u201d she says \u2013 ageing as a woman, and becoming a mother.<\/p>\n

Stepping on to the stage in a dressing gown and hair rollers, Bea kicks off with a short set of older material before Shane Daniel Byrne<\/a>, her opening act, appears. After explaining that she\u2019s looking dishevelled because she\u2019s not ready for the main show just yet, she delivers a line on being diagnosed with ADHD later in life. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe doctor who diagnosed me said he remembered seeing me at Live at the Apollo a few years ago and thinking, Oh, she definitely has ADHD. \u201cHe could\u2019ve have sent me an email,\u201d she quips.<\/p>\n

Bea has been a television-comedy mainstay for more than a decade, regularly appearing on QI, 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and The Last Leg, among other programmes. Viewers know that she is brilliant, quick-witted and slightly kooky.<\/p>\n

But what you can easily forget is just how charming Bea is. She oozes likeability, making people laugh without coming across as mean spirited or punching down.<\/p>\n

Just because she is light doesn\u2019t mean she is without edge, though: she delivers sharp one-liners about JK Rowling, Bill Gates and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor \u2013 who as a Pisces, she says, \u201cfeels everything\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Aisling Bea: I want to be \u2018easy and nice\u2019 but sometimes it is not possibleOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The main part of her set is about her relationship with religion, becoming a mother at 40 and, as the show\u2019s title implies, now being older than Jesus Christ was when he died.<\/p>\n

She articulates with warmth and humour how strange it is to live with a father in her home for the first time in almost four decades; her own father died when she was three. \u201cI do the dad jokes while Jack\u201d \u2013 Bea\u2019s partner, the musician Jack Freeman \u2013 \u201cfeeds the baby\u201d.<\/p>\n

She glows when speaking about their daughter, Saoirse, who is now just over 18 months old, rounding out a gig that delivers clever one-liners, offbeat physical gags and delicious full-circle stories.<\/p>\n

To close the show, Like a Prayer fills the auditorium, and Bea shakes an altar bell to the Madonna track, having dealt with the ins and outs of Catholicism without once reverting to despair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aisling Bea: Older Than JesusVicar Street, Dublin\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606 \u201cJesus was someone I looked up to a lot growing up,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[13655,93,61,60,37168],"class_list":["post-361238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-aisling-bea","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-vicar-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}