Live Report: Aisling Bea explores expectations with Older Than Jesus at Vicar St.

It’s crazy to think that Older Than Jesus is Aisling Bea’s first stand-up tour.

The comedian, writer, and actress started doing stand-up back in 2009, has had multiple shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, has featured as a captain on 8 Out Of 10 Cats, and won a BAFTA for creating and starring in Channel 4’s This Way Up, among many other things. With all that under her belt, you’d expect that she would have done a stand-up tour at some point. But Aisling Bea does nothing if not defy expectations, and her debut tour Older Than Jesus proves to have been well worth the wait.

Fun pop songs play from speakers at Vicar Street on Monday evening as everyone finds their seats, until the tables, seats, and balcony are all filled. A sign language interpreter walks onstage, the lights dim, and the music fades. The opening of Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’ comes on, the sounds of the organ and choir filling the room, and Aisling Bea walks onstage. Well, pokes her head out.

She whispers something along the lines of: “No, no, not this one yet! This is the surprise song for later! Play something else! Something more me!” The song abruptly stops, and is replaced by Cardi B’s ‘WAP’, which Bea also objects to.

They cycle through a few more songs before Bea finally says, “Oh, just play some bossa nova and I’ll twinkle out.” The music obliges, and Bea comes out, wearing a bathrobe and shower cap. She begins by talking to the crowd, playing with them, goofing with her sign language interpreter, picking out individual audience members and interacting with them.

Once the crowd is good and warmed up, she says that she has to go and get ready for the show, and leads a round of applause for her opener, Irish comedian Shane Daniel Byrne.

Byrne delivers a solid set, with stories about social media comments and Sex Ed. class from his perspective as a young gay man (throughout the set, he employs a delightfully vulgar hand gesture and a mischievous grin to remind us that he is gay). The highlight of the set is an essay he wrote in Gaeilge for his leaving certificate exam at 17 years old, translated in all its stilted, ridiculous glory into English.

After Byrne’s set, there is a short intermission, and then, once the crowd is settled back in their seats, the lights dim, the sign language interpreter reemerges, and ‘Like A Prayer’ starts playing - for real, this time. As the song hits the chorus, Bea bursts onstage in a cozy looking sweater and sparkly pants, and launches in with an explanation of the show’s title - Bea is now older than Jesus was when he died - and a story of being an altar boy as a child.

The show is full of sharp jokes and silly stories, with sections sometimes punctuated with a pun to tie them together (the phrase “turd trimester”, for example, is excellently deployed). After 17 years of standup, Bea is clearly very good at what she does. She plays off the audience, deftly involving them in the show without letting them derail it, taking their responses totally in stride.

There’s a fun section on the joys of major surgery and giving birth by C-section, and a recurring, off-the-cuff bit about aggrieved older-siblinghood, which features great lines like “You were only born in case I got lonely.” At one point, despite saying at the start of the show that she doesn’t do impressions, she breaks out a solid Britney Spears impression.

Her delivery is enthralling, her voice rising and falling throughout the show and keeping the audience completely entertained.

The cohesive show is chock full of callbacks and repeated characters, which, in addition to being funny in their own right, act like narrative sheepdogs, artfully herding her many playful digressions back to the topic at hand. Each section flows smoothly into the next, and the end of the show ties neatly back to the beginning.

The show, while centred around the story of the birth of Bea’s first child, is about much more than just that story - as all good stories tend to be.

At its core, Older Than Jesus is about expectations. A lot of comedy in general is about playing with people’s expectations, including much of Bea’s past work: “The school I went to didn’t have much money, and so a lot of the sports facilities weren’t great, and so a lot of the sport and exercise we used to do would leave us really…pregnant,” goes one characteristic joke from her set Live At The Apollo in 2014. But here, Bea finds more humor by diving deeper into expectations themselves: what is expected of us, what we expect of ourselves, what we expect of others.

That exploration ties the whole show together, and each joke underpins that central motif. The theme and the jokes work in tandem, elevating one another, making sure the message of her show doesn’t ever come at the cost of laughs. And when she builds to a point at the end of the show, it feels inevitable - and, most importantly, very funny.