Comedian and improviser John Spillane is coming to this year's Dublin Fringe Festival with his latest show John Spillane's CGI Comedy Spectacular in 3D!!! Promising an hour of 100% improvised CGI-powered chaos, every night John and the audience will join forces to create a brand-new show from scratch, complete with 'relatable themes, a relatively cohesive plot, and emotional payoffs'.
You might laugh! You might cry! Literally anything could happen...
We asked John for his choice cultural picks...
FILM
A random little movie I saw recently and loved is called Mandibles. It’s like a French Dumb and Dumber about these two best friends who discover a giant house fly they decide to train to commit crimes for them. It’s so stupid in the best way.
MUSIC
I’ve seen Scustin perform a few times in the city and they are just brilliant craic. I just booked my tickets to their December show and can’t wait.
BOOK
Marise Gaughan’s memoir Trouble is an absolutely brilliant piece of writing. The book is one of those miracles where the content is so bleak and so dark, but the writing is just so so funny you can’t believe the stuff you end up laughing at. I can’t wait for whatever she writes next.
THEATRE
I’ve seen a few great plays from fellow comics recently, including Best Man (Mikey Fleming/Colman Hayes) and The Last Incel (Jamie Sykes) but one from a few years ago that still really sticks with me is Erica Murray's The Cat’s Mother. It’s about these two Irish sisters trying to have a very difficult conversation about their mother and it was really something special. I’ve heard her most recent play The Loved Ones is just as brilliant!
TV
Wrestling. Just any wrestling. WWE, AEW, Mystery Wrestling on Twitch, it’s all great! I know most people think wrestling stopped being good in the 90s (and it kinda did) but it’s been through a real renaissance recently and definitely worth giving a second crack if you’ve fallen off. There’s also a lot of live wrestling in Dublin with a promoter called OTT and I promise you there’s nothing more liberating than going down to the National Stadium and screaming at a bunch of strangers (allegedly) pretending to fight.
Tenth Year Anniversary
— OTT WRESTLING (@OTT_wrestling) August 11, 2024
Oct 26th National Stadium #Dublin 🇮🇪
COMING SOON!#OTT pic.twitter.com/XtyDbM3k7C
GIG
MATE Comedy Variety Hour is consistently my favorite gig in Dublin. It’s run by real life best friends Mikey Fleming and Kate Moylan, and the show is basically a showcase of some of Dublin’s weirdest and most creative acts doing some of the most bats**t stuff. I’d also like to mention MOB, Bum Notes, CabarEGG, Autocorrebt (that’s the actual spelling) and Club Valentine, who also all regularly put on really exciting shows around the city.
PODCAST
The only podcast I regularly listen to is Call it, Friendo, it’s a movie podcast from Donnchadh Tiernan and Andy Ritchie where every week they watch a film based on a flip of a coin. The lads pick really interesting and obscure stuff you might never have heard of and it’s basically a book club for movie nerds. So if you’re sick of scrolling endlessly on Netflix, check their podcast out, I can’t tell you how many amazing movies I discovered thanks to the both of them.
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TECH
Mostly when I’m on my phone I’m just refreshing my own Instagram page over and over again. That’s what 90% of my day looks like. The other 10% you ask? Pilates.
THE NEXT BIG THING...
There’s a brilliant wave of new young alternative comedians in Dublin and too many to list here but a few who come to mind are Man Overboard (a brilliant sketch duo), Ross McCarney (one of those people who could read the phonebook and make it funny) and Maria Cunningham (who is so creative, imaginative, wild and original it’s honestly intimidating).
John Spillane's CGI Comedy Spectacular in 3D!!! is at the Lir Academy Dublin from 18 – 21 September, as part of this year's Dublin Fringe Festival - find out more here.
