Rising comedy star Michael Fry admits becoming an overnight internet sensation has been ‘mental’ as he opened up about how his fast track to success has taken a toll on his life.
And after a whirlwind few years - which saw him swap a 9-5 office routine for internet fame and stand-up gigs - he revealed he will be taking a well deserved break to take it all in and recharge.
He told the Irish Daily Mirror: “It’s been mental. I’ve been filming something there for the last six weeks.
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"I can say more about that soon, it is a big enough deal, and then I was recording the second series of the Michael Fry show for BBC Sounds and a festival and another festival in a week's time so it is a lot. A long couple of years."
The Navan native, best known for his satirical sketches and musical renditions of viral videos on Twitter and Instagram, added: “It was rough kind of the start of 2021 because I was doing the masters and the music and because I was having loads of good ideas at once I was making loads of songs and that really took a toll on me after awhile.
“But it kind of hasn’t slowed, so I actually really need this month off so I can recover a little bit.
"I think it is that thing with any freelancer, you don’t work, you don’t get paid. There’s no holidays or that kind of thing so I am going to have to get better at managing my time and that kind of thing, you know."
The online comedian and musical parodist, whose real name is Matthew Dinneen, first shot to fame on social media in 2018, when he posted some satirical sketches about radio presenters and comedic songs.
“It snowballed from there and people were like ‘who is this guy?,” he recalled, also reflecting on the day he had to alert his then bosses in his Tourism Ireland graduate programme that they may come across him online.
From there his online persona ‘Michael Fry’ was born in order to separate his work life from his online presence.
He has since gone on to bag his own BBC sounds series, has starred in hit Irish series’ Derry Girls and Holding, and will next week join the likes of Tommy Tiernan as part of the Paddy Power Comedy Festival line-up.
Was it all part of a grand master plan? “No, not really,” he insists.
“I don’t know what I was expecting when I put it up first. It was a bit of craic to be honest and I thought 100 likes or even a 1000 followers was my target.
“I didn’t imagine it would go to this, and this quickly as well. It has just seemed to have blown up over the past few years.”
And the star, who was working as social media editor for The Mirror, The Star and The Express, before he decided to focus fully on his online work last year, said if he had known what was to come, he would have chosen a more adventurous stage name.
“I was trying to look for a funny username and Big Dirty Fry wasn’t taken and I just thought that was funny.
“And then I had used Michael in lots of my videos, and because I wanted to keep my work thing separate I knew I wanted a different name and Michael Fry just worked and I’ve used it since.
“But I kind of wish I had picked something more exciting.”
The funnyman noted how his online fame has catapulted him into the main arena amongst some of Ireland’s leading names in comedy - bypassing the years of slogging out open mic nights and fighting for a spot on stand up stages like many before him.
On his upcoming gigs at the Comedy Festival next week at Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens, he says: “It does feel mad, it feels very soon after doing my first couple of gigs.
“I only started doing stand up a couple of months ago but obviously when you have a name you can skip a lot of queues so I didn’t have to do the open mic night stuff I was able to jump in with half an hour material and go from there.
“But it has happened really fast and I am excited by it.
"When I started live I was dreading it and thought I’d hate it and said ‘okay i’ll do one gig and I’ll never do it again.
“I actually look forward to doing them now. I was on my way to my first gig and we went past Heuston station and I thought I could just go and hop on a train to Cork and never look back. I was really nervous and I couldn’t eat.
“And then I really liked it and thought this is something I want to do again rather than something I have to do because it is money and profile and stuff.”
“I'm feeling great about it.
“There’s a lot of online acts this year as in people who have come through the internet so it is a real validation of us I think,” he added.
Tickets for the Paddy Power Comedy Festival, which is a strictly over 18s only event, are on sale now and are sold on a show-by-show basis.
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