David O’Doherty and the Mechanics of Things

We are heading down a backstreet in a residential part of Brunswick to meet David O’Doherty, who’s in town for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with his new show Highway to the David Zone.

As we pull up to an unassuming roller door, we meet David not backstage, or in a festival green room, but in a bike repair shop he loves, run by a mechanic named Tobias — described to us as a savant of bikes. The garage is full of lush ferns and vintage steel bikes lovingly attended to by the smiling Tobias. Inviting us in, David describes how the mechanics of fixing a bike are like solving an exciting puzzle. It feels like an apt interview setting for a comedian whose mind seems to work in a similar way, with our conversation expertly zigzagging and revealing itself, from steel bike frames to Dutch urbanism, from writing children’s books to Irish revolutionary history, and the quiet psychological relief of riding alone in the countryside.

Tobias and David at Sun Up Cycles in Brunswick

We begin with hard-hitting journalism: whether he can substantiate the claim on his Wikipedia page that, while at university, he was in a “fake breakdancing society”, and just what a fake breakdancing club actually does. As it turns out, it involved gaming the student union into giving them free Guinness, before taking things a step further and introducing breakdancing as a topic in the library cataloging system — one which still exists today, some twenty years later. But we soon get back to the important stuff: bikes. Specifically, bikes in the Yarra.

O’Doherty tells us about “the most modern job” he has ever seen while performing in Melbourne: a worker geolocating rental bikes that had been thrown into the river typing into his computer on the river banks, while another fished them out using a high-powered magnet. “We used to farm the land,” he jokes. “Now we’re fishing out bikes.”

As we move through the space, looking at different bikes, it becomes clear that they are much more than a way of getting around for David, or even simply a hobby. For David, bikes are a way of thinking about cities, creativity and, perhaps most importantly, about getting out of one’s own head. He speaks admiringly of Amsterdam’s often taken-for-granted transformation from post-war gridlock to cycling capital, and of Paris under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, where streets were pedestrianised and people adapted far faster than the culture-war panic predicted. Once the change happens, he suggests, people quickly forget the old order ever made sense. He has little time for cycling snobbery either, describing the Lycra-heavy end of the culture as “the divorced dentist dads of cycling”, pushing instead for a much more accessible approach to cycling.

Cycling, for O’Doherty, is also deeply personal. He talks about riding as an antidote to the peculiar self-seriousness that stand-up can breed. “I don’t think doing stand-up comedy is going to be good for your brain,” he tells us, (half) jokingly. It can invite navel-gazing, and too much time spent thinking your show is of world-historical importance. By contrast, cycling offers a kind of release. When you ride, he says, your body knows what to do, and your mind loosens. “It’s kind of like hoovering or shaving. It gives this sort of freedom to the brain.” A lot of his fantasies and ideas, he tells us, arrive there, while half in motion, typically on a country road somewhere.

That rhythm — mechanical, repetitive, but also freeing — is reflected in comedy too. Once a show is up and running, he says, it becomes structural: a puzzle of timing, sequence and design. “You’re still making it funny and being in the jokes every night, but you are also thinking about it as a structure… If that bit went there and so on… it’s a sort of a puzzle that you’re trying to work out, which is what I always think bikes are.” He looks admiringly to Tobias’s resolved ‘old-school-mechanic’ handiwork and continues, “and if you get the puzzle right, it’s a beautiful thing.”

Wrapping up a tour or a festival leaves David itching to get home to a celebratory “ludicrous bike project”, something practical to counterbalance the abstractions of performance. The obsession has gotten so big that he jokes his partner hears him tapping at a keyboard and “rather than think I’m corresponding with some lover, she’ll just be like, you better not be buying a bike”. You can, as we come to learn, apparently, fit four in the sitting room, three in the hall, one hung in the kitchen and another ten in a shed — “not a popular way to live your life,” as he puts it, but clearly a workable one. He loves fixing up strangers’ and friends’ bikes alike, including, at one point, live on stage during a past show: rethinking what they need, changing handlebars, adding baby seats, finding new uses for old frames, where an old racing bike becomes a family bike. “A good bike can move through your life with you as well,” he says.

At this point, some friends with young children drop by wanting to snap a photo with David, so we naturally segue into an aspect of his career that sits – seemingly – far outside late-night festival slots: children’s books. O’Doherty has, in fact, been writing for children longer than he has been doing stand-up. The path into it came through youth work while he was at university, spending time with kids in care, playing football and pool, and making up stories with them. His first book was published in 2000, and he has kept writing ever since, with one of his recent books winning Irish Children’s Book of the Year in 2022. He has also written plays and radio series.

He recounts, excitedly, the memory of being a child and reading a book so good you stay up too late for “one more chapter, one more chapter.” That feeling, he says, is one of the main motivations for writing them. He reflects candidly that some children’s authors are better plotters than he is, so his process involves sticking to what he knows he does well: filling the books with as many ridiculous jokes as possible. His ideas regularly move back and forth between children’s books and stand-up. Some begin in children’s fiction and end up in grown-up shows, he tells us; others make the trip the other way.

O’Doherty also speaks admiringly of the creative lives of people around him who have simply gotten on with the job of being creative, and how this has shaped his own writing process. He points to his long-time friend, the novelist Paul Murray, whom he remembers writing constantly whenever even a small moment presented itself. “In university, if the lecturer was 5 minutes late, he would go to the back of his notes and just be writing a short story or a part of a novel and just throwing ideas into it the whole time.” He sees something similar in his father, a respected jazz musician, for whom art was never a rarefied state of waiting for inspiration, but something you simply got on with. Reflecting on his dad’s approach, he quotes Cole Porter’s line about whether the music or the lyrics come first when writing a song, to which Porter answers: “the phone call comes first.” David sees inspiration in this, pointing to a process that is “sort of fearless”, where writing does not have to be “a high-minded pursuit where you need to go off and live in a cabin for a year to write a book”; instead, “it’s something you get on with your life and do.”

But no discussion of influence would be complete without his family history — something David touches on in his show and speaks about with real veneration as we move between the shop’s bikes and ferns. O’Doherty’s great-grandmother Kitty O’Doherty, he tells us, was a revolutionary figure in Ireland’s independence movement, carrying money sewn into her corset back from America to help establish the first illegal parliament. He traces a loose family arc from revolutionaries, and proud state-building public servants, to jewellers and artists, jokingly reflecting on the shift from careers of necessity to ones of self-expression. This is what happens when a professional storyteller and funny man tells you a story: in a few minutes David has covered rich family and Irish history while balancing it with a joke about the strangeness of ending up here — a comedian in a bike shop in Melbourne, descended from people with guns under floorboards. “Maybe if you look at Che Guevara’s family tree,” he jokes, “they all also end up in the comedy industry within three generations.”

Even here, while discussing the influence of his family history, bikes reappear as a theme. He recounts how his grandfather, researching his memoir of the revolutionary period, returned to a childhood home and found the mark where a British soldier’s bullet had once hit the front door after firing at him and his father as they rode to school. “It was a bicycle that possibly saved his life or possibly nearly lost his life,” O’Doherty says, half-jokingly. As is the case for so many people who lived through that period of Irish history, or are descendants of those who did, there is a lasting, acute awareness of what it means to still be here (but told with a classic Irish humour). “I do think about that [story] in terms of the idea that I wouldn’t be speaking to you now if that bullet had been a foot lower.”

O’Doherty speaks about Ireland now with a kind of cautious hopefulness. He talks about the country as a work in progress, changeable rather than fixed, excited about the revival of the Irish language in schools and in pop culture through groups like Kneecap. He is interested, too, in what that changing Irishness might make possible in his own work: something to do, perhaps, with the revolutionary legacy of the generations before him and the more fluid, less rigid country emerging now.

Speaking about comedy festival life, O’Doherty describes the first festivals he attended and performed at as a kind of ecstatic overstimulation: racing around “like Sonic the Hedgehog” trying to consume every party, every show, every strange 3AM happening under a bridge, until your body gives out and you go to the doctor complaining that “your hair is sore.” After a couple of decades, he has learned to pace himself. Melbourne now offers something else: familiarity, old friends, football games with other comedians, and time in places like Tobias’s shop. It’s at this moment that he pulls out a photo from the first MICF comedy soccer game — now a standing tradition — that belongs in a comedy museum, featuring a baby-faced Noel Fielding, Charlie Pickering, Lee Mack and many more icons, David among them, huddled excitedly on a football pitch. He reflects that the festival offers a chance to be surprised by younger performers making work on their own terms, or by unexpected gigs that bring sudden inspiration. “So often the thing that inspires you at a festival like this is the last thing you expect. Someone says, ‘come on, a bunch of us are going to see this thing at 11 in a shed somewhere’ and that sets the fire inside you where for the next year, you’re thinking about that, and whatever way that goes through your head, it then starts to influence the next thing.” He speaks warmly about being inspired by other artists and about trusting your gut — in comedy, in festivals, in anything worth doing. If the idea is good, he says, keep going.

When he was younger, David tells us he imagined representing Ireland in the Tour de France. While that didn’t happen, today he performs a song on his classic mini electric keyboard to a packed out room about talking to the stars at night about his problems. To which the stars inform him they are insignificant and stupid problems, which, as vast burning suns, they couldn’t care less about. Having hung out together for an hour in a bike shop, this story and song start to make more sense. David seems to be someone that can hold real reverence for things, without making a fuss about it: from revelling at the ‘breakaway’ moment in a Tour de France race, to repurposing an old bike for a friend or geeking out with Tobias in between comedy sets, to the mechanics of a show or the writing process of a kids book, to the rhythm of a good cycle through the country where ideas flow, or the long afterlife of nations political histories. For David it is all one interconnected puzzle, which he approaches with reverence that is both light and reflective, and most importantly, very funny. We leave a giddy David and Tobias chatting about bike repair as a classic Melbourne thunderstorm rolls in over the garage, newly inspired to get on a bike ourselves, if not for the pesky rain.

David O’Doherty’s Highway To The David Zone runs at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival until 19 April. Tickets and session details here.