Most fans of Irish comedian David O'Doherty know his ode to one of the modern-day nightmares – sending a text message to the person the text is about. It's a nightmare Immigration Minister Peter Dutton learnt the hard way at the beginning of the year, sending an offensive message about a journalist to the journalist herself.
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"It was just one of those things where I woke up one morning and had like 800 Twitter notifications and at least 600 of them were Australian people going 'look – this guy's done exactly the thing from your song from 2007'," says O'Doherty from his home in Dublin.
"I know [my song] was getting played on the ABC and stuff so now I'm gonna get a royalty cheque at some time and then I guess I'll buy that guy a gift – maybe a tie. Maybe I'll buy him a smart phone – he can block some people on it. I'm happy to play a small part in the downfall of Australian democracy if that's how it begins.
"It turns out it was an incredible premonition, that song. It turns out all of my material comes true nine years later. The world just takes ages to catch up to the sweet, sweet ideas in my show."
Now a favourite on the Australian comedy circuit, Doherty will visit Australia for the first time in four years with his new show, We Are All in the Gutter, But Some of Us Are Looking at David O'Doherty.
"It's like the World Cup, that's what you're supposed to do isn't it, or the Olympics? You just wait for a cycle, a new generation of people," he says.
"So I've had people subtly mentioning my name in conversation, real next-level marketing for the last four years, and now I think it's at the point where people may want to know if I have any new exciting things to say."
The show is loosely named after the Oscar Wilde quote, a title Doherty found fitting after his home country legalised same-sex marriage last year.
"Oscar Wilde was born about five minutes from where you're speaking to me now, so I thought it would be appropriate then in the year of marriage equality for Ireland's most famous gay, to steal one of his great quotes and ruin it in the title of my show," he said.
O'Doherty joined 18 other comedians from around the world before the same-sex marriage referendum last year to make a video encouraging Ireland's population to vote "yes", and his show spends "an extended sequence" talking about the historic event.
"The fact that people just came together, the fact that the marriage equality campaign was a grass-roots campaign; the beautiful part was the brain trust behind the yes vote decided the way to do that was people going out and telling personal stories on doorsteps. You've just got gay and lesbian people going round calling on rainy Tuesday nights and going 'hello this is why I think it would be great if you voted yes'.
"I'd always thought of this country as having an old guard of right-wing Catholics and we were just going to have to wait for them to die off before we could change the country, and then suddenly they all had their minds changed over the course of this three- or four-month campaign, and it filled me with a sort of hope really."
On top of the normal random musings that come with any David O'Doherty show, he will also touch on everything from excessive inspirational videos to the anxiety caused by social media.
"One of the huge problems of our time is the belief that most people I know have, which is that everyone else in the world is having a much better time than them and it's exacerbated by Instagram culture and social media generally.
"It used to just be celebrities; you'd look and say to yourself, 'Wow, Princess Stephanie of Monaco is having a great time' but now it's just everyone – it's crappy idiots on reality shows.
Coming with him again is O'Doherty's trusty "crappy keyboard from 1986", although it's not the same model that visited our shores last time.
"They die about once every six months and I give them a sort of smashing funeral on stage then I go straight to eBay and buy another of them," he says.
"There's a specific model of keyboard I love, which is a Yamaha one from 1986, and I would say I probably own most of the world's remaining ones at this point, there's about 10 of them."
The show has already spent a month at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, plus tours through Ireland, Europe and the US, and will continue on to the Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney comedy festivals, with Canberra getting in first. Whether the current keyboard makes it here or not, O'Doherty thinks Canberra's shows could be the best in the country.
"It'll be at the beginning of the tour, so I'll be full of joy. And hopefully and I won't have lost my voice yet."
David O'Doherty is at the Sydney Comedy Festival on April 17-18.
