When Irish comedian Kyla Cobbler stepped onto the stage for her first live stand-up comedic performance in September of 2020, it didn’t go as you’d imagine. For several minutes prior, Cobbler’s friend, fellow comedian and Irishman, Mike Rice, encouraged her to get up and perform while they sat in the audience at Imprfcto Comedy in Barcelona. Cobbler had a massive crush on Rice at the time, but still she refused. “I never saw myself doing live stand-up… The idea petrified me.”
Cobbler, who had lived in Italy for eight years, is fluent in Italian. When she saw that almost all of the small audience in attendance that evening was Italian, she thought that perhaps she could do it. Shaking “like a leaf” with nerves, as she describes it, Cobbler took a shot of whiskey and walked on to the stage. “I just said in Italian, I’m really into this guy [Rice]. I’m trying to impress him. So if you could just get on board here and just give me a few giggles just to seem like I’m hilarious…They thought it was so funny. I got off and everyone’s like, Oh my god, you crushed,” Cobbler says, but she didn’t feel like it at the time.
Less than five years later, it’s easy to say that Cobbler is crushing it. The thirty-four year old has almost half a million followers on Instagram and is traveling all over Europe with her Gone Rogue comedic stand up tour. Her trajectory is a reminder to all of us that even the biggest careers often start in small, unexpected places.
So when and where did Cobbler’s career as a comedian begin? “She was always really funny and very quick off the mark with responses,” says her mother, Mary. Cobbler, who grew up in Ballincolig, a suburb of Cork City, Ireland, acknowledges that her family and Irish roots influenced her. “The level of fun we have is just unmatched,” Cobbler, the middle of three children, says of Irish culture. Comedy and humor also provided a means to connect in her household. “We’re not an overly affectionate family,” Cobbler says of her family, noting that her dad is also very funny. “We never had deep conversations or moments of all hugging each other. That just didn’t happen.” But through her family, Cobbler learned that humor and comedy was a tool “that brought people together.”
Not all aspects of growing up in Ireland were easy for Cobbler, who is dyslexic and dyspraxic. She often didn’t feel supported by the schools she attended. “Because I was quick-witted… no one believed I wasn’t able to do it. They were like, ‘she’s just not trying’, ‘she’s not applying herself’, but I really was.” The experience left Cobbler feeling like she was stupid. (Despite those memories, Cobbler continues to joke about Irish school uniforms which include a shirt, tie and leather shoes. “I don’t work in the corporate world. I’m seven, let me be a baby,” she says.)
When the end of the equivalent of her high school years approached, Cobbler’s guidance counselor suggested that hospitality was the career she should pursue. If she was destined to be a waitress, Cobbler thought, why not do it somewhere else? “So I passed my exams and I was like, I just want to get out of here.” Cobbler first traveled to Greece, then to Australia where she fell in love with an Italian and then subsequently moved to Italy. She never attended college, but she always searched for a degree through her life experiences. Cobbler was “always really conscious of having to find a career” and worked hard at every job she held.
While living in Milan, Cobber started to play with social media. No longer living in Ireland, “what I really missed in Milan was the craic,” she says, referring to a famous Irish word, which is loosely translated to “fun.” “I miss[ed] a good time and a giggle.” She started to create videos on Instagram in 2019 to connect with her community at home. People quickly noticed and, over time, her following steadily grew.
At the start of February of 2020, Cobbler moved to Barcelona. “Little did I know, it was where I would start comedy and then my whole life would change,” Cobbler says of the city, where she still resides. “But initially it was just like, let’s go here, let’s learn and see where it takes me.” A month after moving, Spain declared a state of emergency because of the pandemic, ordering everyone to stay at home and only leave for essential reasons. Cobbler, who had just started working in a restaurant, lost her job, forcing her to live off her savings. “I just was on my own. I went absolutely nuts,” Cobbler says, who performed full character sketches and dressed up in an effort not to lose her mind. Through it all, she shared her experience on social media. “I would chat to everyone, so people would write in and we would talk and laugh about it. I created an online community, and that’s why I call it the parish.” By the end of the pandemic, she’d gained twenty-five thousand followers.
2020 was an eventful year for Cobbler in more ways than one. In July, Cobbler’s grandmother, Mona Magennis, who she notes was an “absolute powerhouse” and “the first lady in the parish to wear trousers”, died at age ninety-seven. (“When I asked her about [the trousers], she was like, I just want to be able to ride my bike comfortably. And I was like, boom, functional!”). Cobbler flew home to Ireland and was by Mona’s side on her last night. In the days before Mona died, close to a hundred family and friends gathered in the hospital parking lot, taking turns visiting Mona in pairs due to COVID precautions. Cobbler had never been so close to death and was moved by the number of people who’d shown up to pay their respect.
Unsurprisingly, the experience changed her. “I just knew I had to commit to myself and actually live my life the way I wanted to. I just knew somehow that it would be through comedy and doing something I love, that I found scary, that pushed me in my comfort zone,” says Cobbler. She returned to the stage again in May of 2021 at The Comedy Clubhouse in Barcelona, where she was bartending at the time, for her first open mic in English. She approached the stage drunk and nervous. During the set, she didn’t bomb, but it wasn’t easy either. “I was like, this is a bit difficult and uncomfortable. But there was something compelling me to keep doing it.”
Cobbler never worried that she wasn’t funny. Instead, she needed to learn how to take up space or perhaps to unlearn some of the lessons society teaches us as young girls. “I grew up in a generation of being shushed. So if you’re talking too much, ‘shush’. A good girl would be a girl that doesn’t talk…or say anything and doesn’t cry and doesn’t make noise. So for me to take up space and be listened to for that long, that was the challenge. I felt like I had to rush through my stories because I was like, ‘I’m taking too long to talk,’ which is insane when I think about it now.”
These days, Cobbler is unafraid to tackle topics faced by women that many people often don’t want to hear about, like periods or unrealistic beauty standards for women. “Good job beauty industry, you really got us” she jokingly says into the camera about the number of videos she’d watched of women shaving hair off their faces. “Having the audacity to get older is a sin” she quips in another video that makes me laugh every time when she later proudly refers to herself as a “feral woman.” In another one of my favorites, Cobbler jokingly comments on Kris Jenner’s new plastic surgery. “She looks so young. She looks like an infant, an expressionless haunted infant doll,” Cobbler remarks, with her signature curly hair pulled back and a couple strands hanging in her face. “Talk about just thriving in the medical industry when it comes to women’s bodies,” she adds with a straight face, joking about how much attention goes into plastic surgery for women yet there is insufficient investment into understanding critical areas of women’s health like menopause, periods and pregnancy.
Perhaps that is Cobbler at her finest: She speaks to us honestly about issues that affect women and through her laughter, she helps us survive, or at least feign sanity. “I am just a representation of all of us trying to show up and be our best selves and understand ourselves,” says Cobbler. “I do talk a lot about women’s health and just what it is to be a woman in the world today and how crazy that is.” Every serious comment she makes is often followed by another which makes us laugh. “I think we should be able to laugh at it because we fucking cry enough.”
Luckily, many of us are now laughing with her. In 2024, Cobbler left her job as a barista at an upscale cafe to pursue comedy full-time. That same year, Cobbler sold-out her first Irish tour and also toured with American comedian Michelle Wolf. Just in the last year, her instagram following has more than tripled, with the majority of her views coming from the US. In May of this year, females comprised over ninety percent of her viewers, including several powerful women from around the world. Alanis Morisette, Brene Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert and Juliette Lewis follow her and Sarah Silverman, Sharon Stone, Chelsea Handler and Sharon Horgan have all liked, commented or shared her reels.
According to Cobbler, she gets so much love and support from women because she is just normal. In a reel-saturated world of how to put on ten different make up videos and adoration for plastic surgery, Cobbler’s feed presents an alternative. “The least interesting thing about me should be my looks or what I’m wearing or my makeup,” Cobbler says, who often appears on stage in a baggy neutral colored T-shirt with her tattoos peeking out from the edges and loose fitting pants. “I have to come to this point of loving myself so much that I have to love the ugly bits of me, the bits that I have found hard to deal with.”
And with Grandma Mona’s help, there’s even more love for Cobbler these days. “I remember being with [Mona] and holding her hands and I was like, ‘when you’re up there now, sort me out…Because you’ve got a bird’s eye view nanny, get it done. And send me a fellow as well, single for six and a half years. Send me a fucking boyfriend too, for God’s sake’”, Cobbler reminisces. A year and a half ago, Cobbler met Simon, whom she is now engaged to and will marry in a small ceremony in September. “He’s like my oak tree. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” Cobbler says of Simon, who sat in the front row of her sold out Cork show last year wearing a T-shirt with her face on it.
Cobbler is no longer underestimating herself and wants to continue to perform all over the world. She has already a new tour scheduled for the UK and Ireland in 2025 and 2026, including new material in her Not My Lemons set. She’s not sure when, but she also plans to tour the US soon. It’s hard to know where her career will be in five or even ten years, but what’s clear now is that Cobbler doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon. “The goal is to just keep being an artist…I just want to keep positive, ride the wave, keep being grateful…The goal is to just take over the world. No big deal. Easy peasy…If Conor McGregor can fucking do it, I can.”
Main Image Courtesy of Siun McFadden
