Joanne McNally has just purchased her first house. ‘Like, yesterday!’ The 42-year-old has been renting a flat by herself in Clapham, south-west London, but has now bought somewhere nearby.
Given that she spent a chunk of her 30s in flatshares where the bathrooms were so mouldy that mushrooms started growing, she’s excited. She might get a pet when she moves in. ‘I’d love a couple of chihuahuas, a couple of rabbits and a baby llama. Can you have a llama on Clapham Common?’
McNally is becoming one of the biggest comedians in the country. As a speedy CV, the Irish native: hosts, with her friend Vogue Williams, the podcast My Therapist Ghosted Me (3.5million listeners a month); went on a three-year-long tour in 2021 called The Prosecco Express (she sold out Vicar Street, Dublin’s 2,500-person theatre, 78 times); appears on TV shows like Taskmaster, QI, The Weakest Link and The Wheel; was on The Claudia Winkleman Show last week; and is rumoured to be in the next series of The Celebrity Traitors (‘I cannot [confirm] that, I’d get f***ing killed’). All of which means she has now been able to buy a house.
McNally is – and these are her words – very single and very unfertilised. And a lot of her current tour, Pinotphile, is about those things. When I went to see it in Dublin, the crowd was largely female and giddy. In 2023, one of her gigs at the London Palladium sold the most alcohol in the venue’s 116-year history; in Dublin, I saw two women each holding a pint of white wine. It was a Tuesday. I asked what they liked about McNally and they replied: ‘Oh, she’s just bang on.’
McNally is very much single at the moment – but has at least bought a house
McNally was on stage for 90 minutes and, really, every single line was a joke. There are gags about how, when she gets dumped, her friends always tell her she dodged a bullet (‘even though, I’m the bullet’); tweakments (‘I’ve enough fish sperm in my face to sink an aquarium’); and her hard-partying 20s (‘I didn’t see my jaw for ten years’).
And there are a lot of jokes about men. McNally wonders why they always look awful in sunglasses (‘Do they know they can try them on first?’) and how they are capable of coordinating polyamorous relationships but not, say, owning a fitted sheet. When she complains that men are unable to take decent photos of women, the girl next to me agrees – out loud.
Today, sitting in a London pub and, appropriately, drinking a glass of white wine, McNally says at one point: ‘My whole shtick is taking the p**s out of lads.’ The sort of man McNally takes aim at is, normally, hapless – rather than the angry manosphere kind that everyone is currently talking about. (Though McNally thought the recent Louis Theroux documentary on the subject was fantastic.) And the quite small number of (straight) men who come to her shows find it funny. ‘They know I don’t mean half the s**t I’m saying. I love lads!’ But she did once have to ask a man, sitting in the front row, to please stop scowling and unfold his arms.
After our interview she will fly to Dublin, perform Pinotphile again the following day, and for the four nights after that. By December, when the tour ends, she will have played a total of 151 shows (Taylor Swift’s Eras tour had 149) across Europe, America and Australia, sold out London’s Hammersmith Apollo ten times and become the first Irishwoman to headline Dublin’s 10,000-seat 3Arena – twice.
In person, she is thoughtful and funny, happy to be ‘booked and busy’. But, ‘at the moment, I am doing all of this for my present self,’ she says. ‘I’m on the hamster wheel, and I hope that at some stage I have the sense to step off it.’
Joanne wears: top, Fenwick x Greggs. Earrings, necklace and bracelets, Giovanni Raspini. Rings throughout, Joanne’s own. Tights, Heist. Shoes, Terry de Havilland
McNally was born in County Roscommon, Ireland, and adopted when she was three months old by a couple called Pat and Frank from Dublin. Pat was a nurse, Frank a draughtsman (McNally also has a younger adopted brother, Conor).
She always knew she was adopted. ‘I’ve met other people who are adopted, who have always struggled with it. I never have. I really never have. Now, maybe I’ve buried it. Or maybe I handle it by tap dancing and looking for validation on stage. I don’t know.’
McNally was a loud child in a happy but quiet home. ‘My mum says I came out tap dancing. She was like, “We just didn’t know what to do with you.”’ To make sense of her performing streak, she imagined her birth parents were from ‘this showbiz dynasty’. But when she met each of them in her 20s and 30s, she found they were ‘really nice, very normal people’. A young, unmarried couple who had got pregnant accidentally then separated.
She doesn’t talk much about her birth mother (who’d rather remain private) but does discuss Kevin, her biological dad. He left Ireland for Australia, where he married and had four sons. Kevin flew from Melbourne to Dublin to meet McNally for the first time at a pub in 2018, and, today, ‘we’re kind of slowly building and integrating into each other’s lives’. One of his sons, Finbar, has moved to London and he and McNally recently went out for dinner. A few years ago, when McNally was less famous, she did some gigs in Australia. She wasn’t shifting many tickets, ‘but I did a show [in Melbourne] and I couldn’t figure out why it was selling. Kevin, it transpired, was sending his friends and family the link.’
Her adopted father Frank died, after a long illness and then a heart attack, when McNally was 15. Today, she is truly close to her mother Pat. ‘I’m probably a bit too reliant on her,’ she says. ‘I live in constant fear of her impending death. I’m always trying to get her to do squats.’
Joanne wears: coat, Ducie. Jacket, Marella. Hat, Jess Collett Milliner. Earrings, necklace and bracelets, Giovanni Raspini. Tights, Calzedonia. Suki the chihuahua wears: scarf, model’s own
Pat’s advice before McNally started Pinotphile? ‘This is going to crash and burn.’ Pat’s initial reaction to the show itself? ‘I liked your costume.’ Pat’s response when McNally complained, on the European leg, that she wasn’t selling many tickets in Bergen? ‘Well, sure, how would it sell – we don’t know anyone in Bergen!’
McNally came late to the comedy circuit. By her mid 20s, she was living in Dublin, working in PR, and developing a terrible case of bulimia. ‘I’d say I always had it. I’d say it was always going to be something I slipped into. I was kind of a larger kid. I was self-conscious. I was tall… And I was competitive. I wanted to be good at something… so I decided I was going to be really good at being skinny.’
McNally has spoken about low moments during this period: how she slept in her office to hide her vomiting from her flatmates, and how, by her early 30s, she had to quit her job, become an outpatient at a clinic and move in with her mother.
Today, she recalls when she finally realised she had to change. Her therapist asked her to ‘bring me the benefits’ of bulimia. McNally said men would find her more attractive. The therapist reminded her she’d been dumped. McNally said her work would take her more seriously. The therapist reminded her she’d had to quit her job. ‘So I was racking my brain and [I said] a woman [at a bar] told me I look great. I’m doing this for her.’ The therapist asked McNally if she even remembered this woman’s name. McNally did not.
Tracksuit, House of Sunny. Necklace, Roxanne First. Bracelets, Giovanni Raspini. Shot at The Abbeville, theabbeville.co.uk
She is ‘really concerned’ how being thin is now fashionable – ‘I honestly thought it had gone’ – and I wonder if that’s stressful for someone who’s had an eating disorder. McNally says no. ‘Because I’m so out of that now. And I think [for me] it was locked into youth as well.’ Later, she thinks more about this and says: ‘It takes a long time to shift [an eating disorder]. And, you know, it’s always kind of there in a way. I think in some ways I’m incredibly resilient. But in other ways, there’s a bit of fragility there. But that’s probably the same for all of us.’
It was in 2014, at the age of 30, that she made ‘a mad pivot’ into standup and by 2017 had written Bite Me, a show about bulimia. That got her noticed and signed by Off The Kerb, the same UK comedy agency that represents Alan Carr, Michael McIntyre, Katherine Ryan and Jonathan Ross. (Today, McNally also has agents in Ireland and America.)
She moved to London in 2018 with no money, lived in hostel dorms and took a lot of Megabuses to various British cities to perform. At a certain point in this stint, she went for a drink with Vogue Williams, the Irish presenter who’d been a friend in Dublin. Williams invited her to move into the basement of the home she shared with her husband, the podcaster Spencer Matthews, and their newborn son.
McNally and Vogue Williams had been friends in Dublin and reconnected in London
It was a ‘nice basement’, she clarifies today. McNally had her own kitchen and bathroom; ‘I honestly don’t even know if Spencer knew I was in there.’ Matthews – who was first known as being the resident ‘villain’ on Made In Chelsea – is ‘so lovely. And he was very kind to me during lockdown, when I’d no money. He was, like, “Can I help? Is there anything you need?” And, you know, obviously I took it all and never paid him back!’ She does a massive laugh. ‘No, he’s a very kind person. And he’s mad about Vogue. They have a lovely marriage.’ (McNally is now godmother to the couple’s three-year-old son Otto. ‘It’s a running gag how awful a godmother I am.’ She jokes about hoping the ‘if both parents die, the godparent takes the child’ thing is an urban myth. ‘Spencer and Vogue: please fly separately.’)
After six months she left the basement and moved into flatshares, including the aforementioned mushroom dwelling. In 2021, Williams suggested they start a podcast. The title was because one of McNally’s therapists did in fact ghost her, and the format was simple: sprawling chatter between two funny friends. Within months it had more than a million listeners – and, after years of gigging, McNally went mainstream.
She has said that most men find her stand-up funny, but her comedy style has ‘definitely made dating harder’. ‘Is it very welcoming? Probably not.’
Between 2022 and 2024, McNally had a partner (called Alan) but she’s now single. Last October, a man from Hinge asked her on a date – McNally agreed but said she didn’t have a free evening until December. On the day itself, she woke at 5am for a photoshoot and was so knackered by evening she cancelled. (She’s not on dating apps now: ‘I’d refer to myself as almost problematically independent at this stage.’)
McNally says she still relies heavily on the counsel of her adoptive mother, Pat
McNally feels aware that singleness is something people now associate with her. She once went out with a man who, when she broke up with him, said: ‘Well, of course, it’s kind of bad for your brand now to be in a relationship.’
‘You don’t want to make your whole identity that you’re a single woman,’ she says. ‘But, in the same breath, it does colour a lot of your life.’
Does she want a relationship? ‘I change like the weather.’ At this specific second of our conversation, the answer is no. ‘I’ve no interest in dating.’ And, ‘I won’t get married unless I have a lobotomy.’ But there’s a longer answer, too. ‘I’m under no illusions of the work and the compromise that go into relationships. But don’t get me wrong, there are times where you’re sitting in the flat all week, you’ve nothing to do, no one to meet and see, and you’re like, god, a boyfriend would be really handy right now.’
She continues. ‘When you’re living with somebody, their energy is in the room with you. You hear their shower in the morning. Maybe they’ve got the radio on. There’s life in the house. Living on your own, you don’t have that.’ That, she’d like. ‘Passive socialising is the dream.’
McNally also thinks she might want a child. ‘I’ve lived this life now for ten years and I love it, and there’s always fresh goals to work towards – but I would like something in my life with a heartbeat.’
She froze her eggs when she was 38 and, today, ‘like it or not, the clock is ticking’. If she does have a child, it would likely be with her gay friend Ross. He’s keen to co-parent and has ‘great hair and great teeth’. It wouldn’t be with a future boyfriend because she doesn’t think that would be logistically possible. (‘The time it would take me to meet a man and make him fall in love with me – that’s at least six months.’) Nor does she think a ‘[sperm] donor would suit me, because I travel a lot for work and want someone else to be invested in the child’.
The tricky thing is, when? McNally has become so successful in the past five years, and she’s worried about stopping. ‘When I think about maybe having a child, I mean, what can I do? I can’t. I’ve got an American tour in October. I can’t do that.’ And, ‘that’s a conversation I have with myself regularly. I’m like, are you gonna wake up at 50 and think: “Well, I never had a child but thank god I sold 200 tickets in Salt Lake City”?’
When I ask what she’ll do when the Pinotphile tour ends, McNally says have a long bath. ‘But if I could box [having a] baby off, I’d be delighted with myself.’ She pauses. ‘I just pray I have the sense to do it. I just enjoy my job so much.’
I can see why she enjoys her job. At the end of the show I saw in Dublin, she did a bow, got out her phone and filmed the audience who were, by then, on their feet – clapping, cheering and dancing. She said, ‘Bye girls!’ – because the crowd really was mostly girls – and walked into the wings, and there was another huge cheer. ‘Did you like it?!’ the women next to me asked, shouting because it was so loud. I said I loved it. ‘So did we!’
McNally will move into her new house soon. I ask what she’ll do on her first night? ‘Play music, bop around, drink a bottle of white and have a fag out the window,’ she says.
‘And I might give myself a little pat on the back. Never too big a pat on the back – I’m not big into sentimentality – but, yes, I might give myself a little pat on the back.’
Joanne McNally tours throughout 2026, for tickets visit joannemcnally.com
Hair: Louis Byrne at Premier Hair and Make-up.
Make-up: Jesse Walker using Tatcha.
