British comic Tom Rosenthal has been performing stand-up since the late 2000s, receiving multiple accolades and landing roles in comedy hits such as ITV's Plebs and Channel 4's Friday Night Dinner.
The son of sports commentator Jim Rosenthal, it's no surprise that Tom ended up in the public eye, but he insists that comedy was always going to be his career path.
As soon as he saw Jim Carrey in The Mask, he was sold.
"What a magical thing it is to laugh like that," he reflects. "I think on some level, I wanted to work out how someone could do that, and I dreamed of being someone who could illicit that reaction from someone else.
"I think it is the visceral act of laughter that made me quite obsessed with recreating it and achieving it for myself."
attend the "Friday Night Dinner" photocall
As well as being "a bit magic", Rosenthal says that comedy has become an essential tool for people tackling the drudgery of everyday life.
"Having a sense of humour is a great way to navigate how bleak existence is," he insists.
"Suffering is just baked into existence, failure is baked into existence, and your response to that is kind of determines how well you navigate being alive, and how much you can enjoy life."
At its best, he says that comedy acts as a tool for chipping away at the darkness of everyday life. And when done right, a stand-up can be a channel for that relief.
"You're just a conduit for the collective consciousness," he says. "When it works, it's not just because you're good, it's working because they're good and you're meeting them."
Meeting the audience is the entire aim of Rosenthal's new show, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I Am.
Inspired by the Arctic Monkeys album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, the show will tour the UK and Ireland in 2026, introducing audiences to who Tom is away from the characters he plays.
"It's a series of routines of what I've been, kind of, categorised as," he explains. "It's broadly about navigating the neurosis that I had about being Jonny Goodman [Friday Night Dinner] and Marcus Gallo [Plebs]."
"It also allows me to dress like Alex Turner [Arctic Monkeys frontman] and be silly," he adds smiling.
Despite his evident love for laughter - and a skillset that saw him quickly rise to success - Rosenthal had a surprisingly tough time being on stage.
Diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), the comic describes himself as an "over-thinker" who would often find it difficult to relax while performing.
"I've been on stage thinking about when I can get off," he admits. "I used to see comedy as an adversarial thing, and the crowd had to be almost won over; I had to convince them of something - they were the enemy to some extent. Now I've kind of managed to reframe comedy."
At 38-years of age, having recently welcomed a young baby to the world with his fiancée, he says he has a whole new perspective on life. Though not for the reasons you may think.
His change of heart came about quite suddenly during an experience with ayahuasca, a psychoactive tea traditionally used by Indigenous cultures in South America for shamanic healing.
"It's pretty new," he says of his spiritual journey. "I don't want to be a North London, middle-class cliché, but I went to Brazil and took some powerful hallucinogens and sort of had an interaction with, I suppose, a sort of higher power.
"It made me very conscious of this concept of how we are - at our best - vehicles for a higher thing flowing through us. Our job is to sort of get out of our own way, our own addictions, our own proclivities or baser drives, and try to allow this thing to work through us."
"This sounds a bit wa**y, and I don't know if it's going to sell any tickets to a comedy club in Dublin," he laughs, "but the idea of being a conduit for the crowd's consciousness, it makes a lot more sense of why comedy, to me, is like a spiritual experience."
"That experience I had at 13 watching Jim Carrey, that sort of magic now makes sense. In that instance, he was an incredible conduit for the divine, and I experienced the divine through him and his gift because he was so free and so out of his own way."
"It really switched up my worldview and allowed me to enjoy doing comedy," he surmises, "so I'm very grateful for it... but I don't advocate for it... because it's illegal."
Tom Rosenthal brings Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I Am to Dublin's Sugar Club on Thursday, 26 March.
