Barry Egan: Queen of Electric Picnic Aisling Bea has thousands laughing their faces off during raucous set

The comic from down the road in Kildare rocked the comedy stage. She had everyone in knots of laughter for over an hour.

It was one of the funniest hours I’ve ever spent.

She told the crowd that she was a bit tired because she has a new boyfriend.

He’s a musician she tells the crowd before a string of jokes involving drums and saxophones that would make an Irish mammy blush.

At one point she does the sounds of a music festival in her most private part for anyone who isn’t sure at the Electric Picnic music festival last night.

Cue 4,000 rolling with laughter in county Laois at an imaginary saxophonist’s penis and Aisling Bea pretending to play it.

The gags were mostly at her own considerable expense.

The star (who told The Guardian in June that she “rebuilt my bathroom around my Bafta” award in 2020) said that when she goes to nightclubs her favourite dance move is “the slut drop”.

Though this intricate piece of choreography comes with complications for her back, her knees, and her body in general.

In other words when she drops down on the dancefloor like Beyonce she has a habit of not being able to get up again. Least not with the same spectacular vigour that she went down.

“I used to be able to bounce to the ground and bounce back quicker than a male celebrity accused of sexual assault,” she said.

Cue 4,000 people laughing their faces off.

Aisling said that when she dies she wants her Instagram algorithms to speak at her funeral because they seem to know her the best.

Aisling dropped the microphone last night at Electric Picnic to indicate her indignation and shock at being IDed on the way into a US nightclub. After seeing her age the bouncer told her she was still rocking it.

“Still f***ing rockin it!!!! Who the hell would you say that to?”

This was almost as upsetting, she went on, as the fact that her mother sold the family home recently, and Aisling is now “pretty much an orphan.”

Suddenly before the sale she was forced to emotionally take in the small details of her childhood home.

She also recalled of her childhood (the Observer once pointed out that she was “raised by women, eight aunts, one nun – her father died when she was three”) and how her mother refused to buy Dairylea lunchables because she “thought it was a waste of plastic.”

“So, to the shame of the whole family, she would buy big packs of cheese and big packs of ham,” she remembers.

She said that because she now lives in England, people don’t understand the jobs she used to have in Ireland. She says she wasn’t allowed in London to put on her curriculum vitae that she had a job as an altar girl.

Aisling Bea Interview

Aisling got all hip-hoppy before telling a story that once heard will never be unheard for 4,000 people sitting on the grass in a big muddy field in Stradbally last night.

It involves a man called Jack who asked whether she wanted to take home some bodies of Christ.

Aisling smiles to indicate that she very much did want to take home some bodies of Christ.

She breaks off for a moment to explain “because I can feel a ripple of panic in the crowd” that they weren’t transubstantiated.

“So, Jack gave me a giant plastic bag of bodies of Christ. And I brought them home. Me and my little sister Sinead got all the bodies of Christ and we cut out our ham and we cut out our cheeses and we made Dairylea lunchables out of our bodies of Christ.”

“We called them Cheeses Christ.” The crowd ate it up.

This is an edited version of a review which first appeared on September 3, 2023.