Into Your Head

When dry-witted Irish sage, acquired taste underachieving amateur humourist, socially awkward practically unheard-of legally blind cat obsessive and husband Neal O'Carroll ingests a litre of generic energy drinks, a transformation occurs. There emerges a taurine-tongued purveyor of madcap monologues, fantastical tales, comical tirades, nonsensical yet impressively argued opinions, ludicrious lectures, copious Two Cats walk into a Bar stories and lately, an enthusiastic cheerleader for a bespoke new pronunciation of the word dog. Every segment is begun with no idea how the first sentence will end, never mind what the subject, if any, will be. Partly inspired by classic radio comedy Just a Minute, Into Your Head is a one-of-a-kind stream of conciousness comedy podcast by Neal from Ireland, and a creative method honed over 18 years and 800 episodes. Writing in the third party for some reason, O'Carroll insists the first five hundred episodes are apalling drivel. It is only in later years that the drivel has matured into whatever you want to call this. Starting in the early 2000s, his ludicrous process was used to write hundreds of rambling nonsense humour columns under the brands Newsburp* and later Neal's Belch. These included the "Two cats walk into a bar" stories which would become a mainstay of the podcast. Next came a dialogue-heavy yet completely unplanned webcomic Matchstick Cats and, in 2006, the first cringeworthy attempts at a podcast. Then came eighteen years of podcasting, unless you don't count the seven year interlude between 2016 and 2023. Which I suppose is reasonable. Anyway, good morning. *No connection to fellow Irish comedy podcast Newsburp, which later acquired that domain.