Irish comic & crowd work specialist Kyla Cobbler ready for first Amsterdam gig

Irish comedian Kyla Cobbler has only been on the stand-up stage for a few years, but she is already taking the world by storm. The Cork native and Barcelona resident recently completed her first headline tour of Ireland with her sold-out show Gone Rogue.

With an expertise in off-the-cuff crowd work, Cobbler will perform in the Netherlands for the first time at Amsterdam’s Boom Chicago theatre on March 3, with tickets still available. Prior to her arrival in Amsterdam, she sat down with Zack Newmark of the Dam Yankee podcast, in partnership with NL Times.

They discussed her approach to crowd work, getting laughs by speaking Italian during her first open mic, and the origin of her stage name. The full interview will be available on major podcast services from March 6, where she talks about starting her comedy career during the coronavirus pandemic, her difficult time as a student, and the gratitude she feels doing the work she loves.

Dam Yankee: You’ve been doing a lot of crowd work in your shows lately.

Kyla Cobbler: I love it. I love crowd work. It's so fun. It's just chats, isn't it? I absolutely adore it. I find it so funny with stand up, because I'm kind of new to it and people are so strict on what it is. They say, “That's improv! That's not stand-up.” And I'm like, well, then call me an improv.

I just prefer to have fun. I need to at least get to know the crowd a little bit, you know? I think it comes from bartending for years. I did old school bartending in Irish rural pubs where there was no music on. If you wanted to have a good time, you had to talk to each other.

DY: Tell us about your first time on stage.

KC: Mike Rice called me a comedian and I was delighted with myself. I really fancied him then. Now we're like best friends, nothing’s ever happened. But then, I thought he was the bee's knees and I really wanted to impress him. We went to an open mic. I just went to watch him, because I would just follow him around. There were only about 15 people in the audience and they were Italian. I was like, "Well, isn't that funny now?"

So Mike was like, "You should go up and do it in Italian." I thought, that's not a bad idea. So, I just took a shot of whiskey and went on stage.

And I said in Italian, “I really want to get with this guy and he wants me to do this. So here we are.” And they loved it. I said, “I'm just going to pretend that I'm telling you something great. Could you all just do a big laugh?” And they all laughed. And I said, “Later when I'm fucking him, I'll think of you guys! We can all do this together.”

Then, obviously nothing happened. Mike and I are like brother and sister now. That was my first time on stage. I'm forever grateful to him. He really opened up something huge for me and changed my life.

DY: The last name Cobbler is a stage name. Where did that come from?

KC: Cobbler came from when when I would go on dating apps. I hated the boredom of the small talk. So I used to tell people I was a zapatera, which is a cobbler in Spanish. A shoe repair person. And I don't know what it was, but fucking men loved it. They were like, "That's so amazing. Was that a family thing? How did you get into that?" And then I would talk absolute bullshit and then meet up with them and say, “I'm a waitress.” It was always a fun little joke. Because people obviously understood I was not a fucking cobbler

But once I went on a date with one guy called Federico. He brought a bag to the date with two pairs of broken shoes and asked if I could fix them. I was like, “My God, I'm so sorry. It was only a joke!” He fucking freaked out.

He was like, “You lying, disloyal bitch.” And then he left me in the restaurant with the shoes and two pizzas and two beers. So I just sat there eating pizza and beer. That went haywire.

Cobbler said she was very excited for her upcoming show in Amsterdam, before jetting off to Oslo. She went on to discuss being one of 12 siblings, growing up in Ireland, and her stint in the fashion industry.

Listen to this entire episode of Dam Yankee wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the full videos on YouTube.