I met Maureen Langan at The Best of Irish show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She was performing a piece from her show Daughter of a Garbage Man. Maureen grew up with an Irish immigrant mother, garbage man father, and five siblings in Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey, where there is no lake. She has performed as a stand-up all over the US, Canada, and the UK. Maureen was a finalist in the San Francisco Comedy Competition, the first woman since Ellen DeGeneres to place in the top three. She is an award-winning broadcast journalist who has hosted her own national TV and radio shows. Darren Walsh came to see my Edinburgh show and said he liked it which I found hard to believe until he told me his father was from Mayo and his mother was from Crumlin. I went to see his show S'pun the following night and loved it. As the title suggests Darren is committed to punning although he also uses props and animation. Having worked as an illustrator, animator and short-film maker, life-long Monty Python nerd and official giant, Darren Walsh decided to try his hand at Stand-up in 2010, using props and strange sound effects he’d made in his bedroom. Singing in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice and playing on a miniature keyboard (or Arnieoke), he would fill the gaps in between songs with a 1-liner here and there. This opened the floodgates and 6 years on Darren has written 3192 more.

B. Dolan is an American rapper, spoken word artist, activist, screenwriter and composer based in Providence, Rhode Island. His latest album is Kill The Wolf. His other albums are The Failure, Fallen House, Sunken City and the live album We Show Up. His three mix-tapes are House Of Bees Vol 1,2 and 3. I discovered him and his music through the Scroobius Pip podcast Distraction Pieces. When I was performing at the Edinburgh Fringe I realised B was performing a spoken word show with fellow Rhode Island rapper Sage Francis who is also the man behind Strange Famous Records. Their show was so good I went twice the second time bringing my two kids. Paul Currie is a Belfast comedian with a very physical and visual style. I first saw him at the Forbidden Fruit festival in Dublin and have been a fan ever since. I saw him this year at Glastonbury on an outdoor stage and like B Dolan I went to see him twice at the Edinburgh Fringe bringing my kids the second time. He really is a highly original genius of a comedian who is carving out a career that is off the beaten path. I love this man.

Pat O'Mahony has been a radio producer on RTE for the likes of Liveline, Mooney, Late Debate and The Ryan Tubridy Show and has produced 5 documentaries for the excellent RTE Documentary On One series including The Forgotten Visit about president Richard Nixon's visit to Ireland and A Silver Lining about emigration and The Stockholm Gaels a gaelic football club in.....well somewhere in Sweden. (They can both be found on the Documentary On One podcast.) He also co produced and hosted You Couldn't Make It Up a 10 part weekly radio comedy news panel show for Newstalk in 2014 for which I contributed as a panelist as well. He also directed his first TV documentary Sleep With Me for Channel 4. Many people will also remember him for his time co-presenting RTE's Head To Toe a weekly fashion show. Myself and Pat have a shared experience in that we were attacked and beaten up together one night as we walked home from town and it was a strange coincidence that when I chatted to Pat he was sporting a black eye from another unfortunate encounter in town