Words by Linda Coogan Byrne

Over the past few years, Aoife Dunne has become one of the most exciting and emotionally intelligent new voices to emerge from Irish comedy. Blending stand-up, theatrical storytelling and painfully accurate observations on modern Irish life, Dunne has built a fiercely loyal audience through her ability to make people howl laughing one minute and feel deeply moved the next.

After first gaining traction online through viral videos and candid reflections on grief, womanhood, shame and the general emotional carnage of being a woman who endured the 90s and 00s in Ireland, she has since amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across social media and the Irish diaspora.

Her acclaimed live show Good Grief, exploring bereavement, emotional survival and the inherited silences many Irish women silently carry, has evolved into one of Ireland’s breakout independent comedy success stories, selling out venues nationwide following a successful Edinburgh Fringe debut, including Dublin’s Olympia Theatre.

I had a chance to chat with Aoife for The Industry Review, and we covered a lot of ground – from dealing with grief and shame to navigating online harassment and what it means to be a modern woman in Ireland. We also talked about how she’s learned to cope with grief, along with tough emotions connected to rising fame and how you can come out stronger on the other side.

Oddly enough, Dunne’s comedy career emerged through a series of unexpected events such as an experience with ayahuasca which she spoke about with The Times, and another one of them being through what was essentially a failed Tinder date with another comedian, a story she still seems faintly baffled by herself…

The Interview

There are comedians who arrive polished, strategic, and market-tested. Then there are comedians like Aoife Dunne who seem to have wandered sideways into public life carrying half the country’s nervous system under their arm.

When we meet over Zoom, the conversation immediately descends into chaos thanks to a pair of headphones still recovering from what Dunne later describes as a catastrophic encounter between her AirPods and a Brazilian toilet. It feels oddly on-brand. Within five minutes, I am already crying laughing.

Dunne’s comedy thrives inside those moments where dignity completely collapses and ordinary humanity spills out underneath.

Over the next hour, what emerges is not simply the story of a comedian rising rapidly through Irish entertainment, but the portrait of a woman attempting to navigate grief, visibility, shame, internet violence, political responsibility and modern Irish womanhood all at once.

Dunne never planned to become a comedian. Growing up in Ireland through the 1990s and early 2000s, she simply did not see women occupying that space in any meaningful way on either side of the pond beyond the occasional exception like Deirdre O’Kane and Jo Brand.

Comedy did not feel like a real pathway available to women. When Dunne lost her mother at 23, her life was plunged into a journey that saw her move towards teaching, acting, youth theatre and drama societies, carrying humour more as instinct than ambition.

There are a few turning points that led her to pursue a career in comedy but one such point arrived almost accidentally sometime around 2015 after a Tinder date with a comedian led her backstage at a comedy show in Dublin. Dunne laughs throughout the story now, still sounding slightly baffled by the fact she did not initially recognise the night as anything particularly significant.

“I genuinely didn’t think anything of it at the time,” she says. “I just thought we were going to a comedy show.”

Backstage afterwards, she found herself naturally joking and chatting with the other comedians.

“I remember one of them was like, ‘Are you a comedian?’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘Oh no, no, no… I’m a teacher.’”

Then, laughing, she adds:

“I’m here today, but I’m stealing his thunder and he absolutely fucking hates me for it.”

Even now, with sold-out venues and a rapidly growing audience online and off, Dunne still talks about comedy almost as though it happened to her accidentally rather than being strategically pursued.

“I think I have a disconnect consistently between who I am now and who I was,” she says. “Even when I kind of fell into comedy, because that’s how I would describe it.”

Yet one of the most endearing things throughout our conversation is how many people around her seemed to recognise her talent long before she fully allowed herself to.

“Anyone who’s known me at any point in my life would comment on how funny I was, but I never thought more about it,” she says, trailing off laughing, before explaining how friends constantly encouraged her to start writing stories and observations down instead of dismissing them as ordinary conversation.

“I suppressed it, or kind of fobbed it off as like, ‘Sure, anyone can make people laugh.’”

Dunne speaks about humour the way Irish people often speak about grief or weather. Something inherited and lived inside rather than consciously manufactured.

A huge part of that inheritance came from her father, whom she describes affectionately as a hippie musician and natural storyteller. Their home was filled with musicians sitting around fires late into the night swapping stories and songs.

“There was always a bonfire on in the garden, and people were always sat around sharing stories,” she recalls. “My dad had all these stories learned off, and he was very funny.”

You can hear traces of that rhythm throughout Dunne’s work now. Her comedy feels conversational rather than performative, almost like somebody pulling up a chair beside you at a kitchen table and exposing every absurd thing Irish women have spent decades pretending is normal and acceptable.

She hilariously captures something that immediately reminded me of my own aunties powerwalking the back roads of Dunboyne through decades of unresolved Irish trauma rather than ever considering therapy (I charge you not to laugh when you look at the video below taken from her Instagram account).

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Dunne has this extraordinary ability to spot the absurd emotional choreography Irish women inherit and normalise so deeply we barely even notice it ourselves anymore.

“And then I was like, this is literally how we deal with trauma,” she says. “My mother’s best friend, she walks like 20,000 steps a day and she doesn’t think she needs therapy.”

Later she adds:

“Again, it’s the absurdity sometimes of the way, I suppose, shame and trauma has shaped us culturally, and then we just accept it.”

That is the alchemy Dunne does so brilliantly throughout her work. She takes behaviours many Irish women grew up seeing every day, the whispering “sorry”, the martyrdom, the emotional repression disguised as productivity, and holds them up to the light until suddenly the whole room erupts laughing in recognition.

Women hiding their underwear at medical appointments despite doctors being moments away from examining them intimately. Women whispering “sorry” every few seconds as though apologising for occupying physical space. Irish mothers and aunties speed-walking twenty thousand steps a day instead of admitting they may need therapy.

She tells me more yarns. Once during an appointment where she has to take her underwear off, she confesses to me how shameful she felt, so she hid her underwear from sight.

“I realised I was hiding my knickers,” she says, laughing. “And then I was like, what? Why am I hiding my knickers from this woman? She’s about to shove her head in my vagina and pull my lips apart!”

The genius of Dunne’s observational comedy lies in its precision. She notices behaviours so culturally embedded that audiences initially laugh in shock before realising they do the exact same thing themselves.

“I think you could spend forever writing about Irish women, and how we fold our clothes when we take them off at a doctor’s visit,” she says at one point.

What becomes increasingly clear during our conversation is that shame lies at the centre of much of Dunne’s work. Specifically female shame. Irish female shame. The strange inherited emotional architecture many women carry without fully realising it.

“There was Catholic shame first,” she explains. “Then as that started fading, capitalist shame arrived through beauty standards and magazines and skinny culture.”

She speaks about this viscerally, as something absorbed physically into the bodies of Irish women. The apology reflex and discomfort around pleasure. The instinct to shrink oneself emotionally, sexually and socially before anyone else has the chance to do it for you.

“I remember still being terrified of sex in school, terrified of boys, terrified of my naked body,” she says. “No Irish woman says it out loud, but we all think it and carry it.”

Dunne speaks openly about how women were taught to fear pleasure itself. One of her most talked-about routines centres around millennial women faking orgasms throughout their twenties because they had become so disconnected from their own bodies and desires.

“I used to fake my orgasms in college,” she says bluntly. “And then I started talking to other millennials and they were like, ‘Yeah actually, I did the same thing.’”

Onstage, she reenacts what she describes as an almost demonic exorcism during her first real orgasm, decades of repression exploding outward in one cathartic release. The reaction from audiences fascinates her. Not embarrassment. Relief.

“The amount of women who literally understand… it’s this beautiful cathartic laughter,” she says. “Hundreds of women next to each other laughing because they experienced the same thing.”

That, perhaps, is the defining philosophy behind all her work. Shame survives most effectively in silence. Once dragged publicly into the light, it starts to lose its authority.

“The only reason it’s shameful and the only reason it’s such a cloud is because we don’t talk about it,” she says.

Importantly, Dunne’s understanding of systems, shame and power does not emerge accidentally. Long before comedy audiences knew her name, she had already completed master’s degrees in both Human Rights Law and Refugee Law, later working as a legal advocate supporting refugees.

The emotional and political literacy visible throughout her work was built not only through personal experience but through years spent studying institutional harm, inequality and human behaviour formally.

What makes her especially captivating is her ability to connect two realms that seldom intersect effectively: intellectual analysis and emotional accessibility. She discusses topics such as misogyny, online radicalisation, grief, shame, or structural inequality in a way that avoids sounding pretentious, as her comedy transforms theoretical concepts into relatable human experiences.

That same instinct underpins Good Grief, the deeply personal live show Dunne developed around the death of her mother when she was young. For years she convinced herself she should have “gotten over it” already. Instead, much of her twenties became a blur of grief disguised as chaos, alcohol, emotional disorientation and self-destruction she later punished herself harshly for.

“I used to hate her,” she says quietly, speaking about her younger self. “I used to be so embarrassed by her… and now I look back and I’m like, oh, she needed to do all that because I was growing up. I was trying to make sense of the world. And I was also grieving.”

Then came what she describes as “a defibrillator on my soul.”

During a holiday in Tenerife with her partner John, Dunne woke suddenly in the middle of the night overwhelmed by the certainty that she needed to write publicly about grief. Not quietly. Not politely. Publicly.

“I woke John up and I was like, ‘I’m gonna write a show about grief and it’s gonna be about all the things I learned to keep quiet, and I’m gonna be really loud about it for other people so that they can be loud about it too.’”

What followed was not simply a comedy show but an excavation of private mourning.

“Why do we privatise grief?” she asks me at one point. “Why do we privatise shame when these are such deeply communal human experiences?”

Again and again throughout our conversation she returns to the same idea: silence protects shame far more effectively than honesty ever could.

“We’re all going through it together,” she says. “As soon as we say it out loud, it feels less heavy, less shameful.”

Visibility, however, comes at a cost. Particularly for women unwilling to remain silent.

In November 2025, Dunne became the target of an enormous coordinated harassment campaign after speaking publicly on social issues. Thousands of abusive comments flooded her platforms alongside rape threats, death threats and racist abuse. Trolls targeted posts involving her late mother. Her account was mass reported until she temporarily lost access. Even after approaching the Gardaí, she was left feeling there was little meaningful protection available for women facing digital violence.

Notably, Dunne deliberately reframes the language away from “online abuse” towards “online violence.”

“That’s what it is,” she says plainly.

For a period afterwards she questioned whether continuing to speak publicly was worth it. Then came a message from a young mother thanking her for continuing to stand visibly against hatred and extremism online. Something shifted.

“No, fuck this,” Dunne remembers thinking. “I’m not going to be silenced.”

What makes Dunne unusual within modern online culture is that her vulnerability appears completely genuine. Unlike influencers who often curate their self-disclosure to maximise audience engagement, Dunne’s honesty is charmingly unpolished and spontaneous, even if it occasionally conflicts with her natural inclination for privacy.

Her transparency is both admirable and appropriate, as she confidently navigates her unique path. More women should follow her example, embracing authenticity without apology and shedding any lingering sense of shame.

Throughout the interview she repeatedly returns to the idea that silence is no longer acceptable once somebody has influence.

“Ten years ago influencers could say they weren’t political,” she says. “I don’t think that exists anymore.”

Yet interestingly, she does not force direct political messaging into her live comedy shows. Instead she sees her stage work and online activism as separate but connected ecosystems. The live work offers catharsis and recognition. Online, she feels a different responsibility exists.

“This is more about my duty of care,” she says of her online presence. “As somebody with such visibility and someone with such a huge platform.”

“There are consequences for women speaking,” she says carefully. “Real consequences.”

Despite everything, Dunne refuses hopelessness.

One of the most sincere moments in our conversation arrives while discussing the public response in Ireland following the death of Congolese asylum seeker Yves Sakila. She posted her thoughts about it here, commenting: “I am sick to my teeth of the overt racism I now see flooding online and offline spaces. I refuse to give hate a fucking inch. And yet its given a full show on social media these days.”

Yet at the same time, Dunne was deeply moved by ordinary people leaving flowers and messages for somebody many had never met. To her, it represented evidence that empathy in Ireland has genuinely evolved, even while extremism grows louder online, it is important to look to each other and within our communities.

We both take a long pause. In respect of the late Yves and what his family and community must be experiencing right now.

“The world is awful,” she says finally. We both agree, yet also recognise the yin and yang of it all too. Our thoughts both arrive at: “But it’s also wonderful.”

It becomes the emotional undercurrent of the entire conversation. Rage existing beside tenderness. Collapse beside progress. The inherited shame and slow liberation of a changing Irish culture woven together through Dunne’s rare ability to make grief laugh without ever trivialising it.

What really stands out to me about Aoife Dunne after our conversation is her understanding of comedy not simply as entertainment, but as collective emotional recognition. Again and again throughout our discussion, she returned to the idea that humour can dissolve isolation, particularly around grief, shame and Irish womanhood itself.

‘The amount of women who literally… ah… it’s this beautiful cathartic laughter,’ she says. ‘Hundreds of women next to each other laughing because they experienced the same thing. Whatever it is, we’re all going through it together. As soon as we say it out loud, it feels less heavy, less shameful.’”

Early in our conversation, I joked that it felt like the entire country had collectively adopted her, and after speaking with her properly, I understood exactly why. Dunne possesses that increasingly rare quality of making people feel simultaneously comforted and confronted. One moment you are laughing uncontrollably at the absurd specificity of Irish womanhood, and the next she has quietly steered the conversation somewhere far more vulnerable, exposing grief, shame, loneliness or fear with startling emotional clarity.

There is an extraordinary duality to her. She can move between hilarity and heartbreak within the space of a single sentence without either feeling forced. Perhaps that is because she never treats humour as escapism. For Dunne, comedy seems to function more as translation. A way of converting private emotional experiences into something communal and survivable.

‘The only reason it’s shameful and the only reason it’s such a cloud is because we don’t talk about it,’ she says at one point.

Again and again, she returns to the same emotional instinct: dragging difficult things into the light before they calcify into silence.

‘There’s something really powerful about pulling the thing out and looking at it for what it actually is,’ she says. ‘The shame absolutely disappears.’

By the end of our conversation, what lingers most is not simply Dunne’s humour, though she is extraordinarily funny. It is her ability to transform deeply personal emotions into collective recognition. To make audiences feel less alone inside their own grief, shame or confusion. To remind people that vulnerability does not weaken connection, it creates it.

For all tour dates, visit https://aoifedunnecomedy.com