We Speak Comedy

Des Bishop Takes the Grey Area Tour Global, From Adelaide to Atlanta

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

Des Bishop. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Some comedians tour a country. Des Bishop tours the map. The Grey Area Tour, his latest international run, spans 54 shows from November 12, 2026 through May 9, 2027, and it is currently rolling through Australia, with stops at Norwood Concert Hall in Adelaide, the Heath Ledger Theatre in Perth and a sold-out night at The Comedy Store in Sydney on November 16.

Bishop’s passport has always been part of the act. Born in London and raised in Queens, New York, he moved to Ireland as a teenager and built a career that treats national identity as raw material rather than a fixed address. He is famous for going further than any comic working today to close the distance with an audience: over the years he has learned to perform stand-up in Irish and in Mandarin Chinese, taking on entire languages as a way into other people’s worlds. The Grey Area, his new show, lives in exactly that in-between territory, the space between countries, cultures and versions of himself.

American fans get their turn soon. The tour’s US leg includes a December 2 date at Helium Comedy Club in Atlanta that has already sold out, a sign that his stateside following has been quietly building through years of festival appearances and word of mouth.

There is a reason Bishop’s routing looks different from everyone else’s this season. He never really belonged to one scene, so he built a career that can play in all of them, an Irish headliner raised in Queens, selling out rooms in Sydney and Atlanta in the same month. The Grey Area Tour is that career at full stretch, and it runs through next May.

We Speak Comedy

Gary Owen’s No Hard Feelings Tour Opens Sold Out in Detroit and Runs 63 Dates Deep

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

We Speak Media

Gary Owen. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The first weekend of Gary Owen’s No Hard Feelings Tour is already a statement: two nights at the Sound Board at MotorCity Casino Hotel in Detroit, November 13 and 14, and both are sold out. From there the run keeps going, 63 dates in all, stretching to May 7, 2027, with Rochester, Buffalo, New York and dozens more cities in between.

Owen’s story remains one of stand-up’s great unlikely launches. The Cincinnati native started doing comedy in 1995 while stationed with the US Navy in San Diego, and was named Funniest Serviceman in America, a title that sounds like a punchline until you realize it launched a thirty-year career. He built his audience the slow way, on the road and on club stages, until he became one of the most reliable theater draws in the business, the kind of comic promoters call when a big room has to fill.

That reliability is written all over this routing. Sixty-three dates is not a victory lap; it is a working comic’s calendar, the schedule of a headliner whose fans show up in every market, every time. The sold-out Detroit opener says the demand is not slowing down, and a tour that runs from November into next May says Owen has no plans to slow down either.

Thirty years on from those first sets in uniform, the No Hard Feelings Tour is Gary Owen doing what he has always done, showing up, night after night, city after city, and leaving audiences convinced the trip was worth it. Detroit found out first. Sixty-two more rooms are about to.