Landing punchlines in the home of kung fu

The experience as a greeter in a restaurant in Hegang, Heilongjiang province, also helped him a lot with his Chinese.

Hegang is a prefecture-level city in Heilongjiang, which is located in the northeastern part of China.

"I worked as a welcomer. Just to put myself under more pressure to speak Chinese."

He also wanted to explore other parts of China.

"Beijing is great, but in Beijing you have a lot of Western things you get used to. Hegang is a small and remote city."

He doesn't think he was a very good restaurant greeter, because instead of welcoming people he had conversations with them.

"Chinese people are very generous," Bishop says. "I spoke a little bit of Chinese. They would say, 'You speak Chinese very well', even though my Chinese was terrible."

To some extent, Bishop's one-man show is something of a homecoming - he riffs on living in China, learning a challenging language and performing stand-up comedy there.

"China is a very interesting and important country. There is a lot more to China than what we read about in the West. I know if Westerners had the chance to see everything about China, they would find it more interesting and entertaining."

Bishop grew up in Flushing, Queens, before the influx of Chinese immigrants into New York. He says that his interest in China dated back to watching kung fu movies as a child.

He moved to Ireland at the age 14 and went on to become one of the country's best-known comedians, even performing some of his jokes in Gaelic.

Recalling the reasons for moving to China in 2013 he says: "It was more a case of one thing leading to another. The quick version is that I met some Chinese guys who became my friends while filming my show The Des Bishop Work Experience in 2003. I visited China with these friends in 2004. So I had a desire to learn their language because I was around them all the time."

Then in 2008, when the Olympics were coming up in Beijing, China's economy was roaring and he says everyone was talking about the place.

He found that learning Chinese would make a good premise for a show. "My job was to come up with ideas that I thought people would be interested in, so I pitched this Chinese journey and got the go-ahead."