Sínann Fetherston chats with British comedian Helen Bauer ahead of her appearance at the Paddy Power Comedy Festival in Dublin's Iveagh Gardens.

The last time Helen Bauer graced the stage at the Iveagh Gardens comedy festival, she had the audience in the palm of her hand, leading ticket-holders through a kind of group therapy, unearthing memories of early 2000s diet culture.

Before she could finish the name of one particularly haunting campaign, the women in the room joined in - a chorus of cackling shared trauma - while the men looked on, mystified.

"Isn't it amazing how much the guys have no idea what we're talking about," she muses. "Like, did they not see the adverts? It's mad!"

"It's my favourite thing of all time," she continues. "Like, here's a shared trauma that we've all chosen to put into the back of our pockets because we can't believe we would fall for a company whose diet means only eating their product.

"And we were in," she adds, laughing. "I love that moment when it's like,' oh, it was everyone'. It's such a coming together of morons; I think of myself as the queen of the idiots."

The cereal-based bit was part of her debut show - fantastically named Little Miss Baby Angel Face - which focused on diet culture, her German ancestry, and how her fantasist mother's need for attention was passed down to the six-foot comic (who wears a custom-made ballgown in the special).

Her new show, quaintly named Grand Supreme Darling Princess, dives even further into her relationships with women, bemoaning the plague of empaths in her life, and exploring her relationship with the Disney characters (she's wearing a Little Mermaid t-shirt as we chat over Zoom).

All of this is to say, Bauer doesn't shy away from embracing and obsessing over everything it means to be a middle-class British white woman.

"I don't have to go on stage and be for everyone, right? All I can do is be the funniest version of me. If that happens to hit with women harder than it does with men, I'm absolutely fine with that. Any comedy festival you go to, there will be a lot less talking just for them. So, why not?"

"It's funny, if they [men] are willing to listen, but if they want to take their mental break while I'm on, it's okay. I'm not going to miss you, John. Good luck to you."

Irish comedy fans will be able to catch some of the new show at the Iveagh Gardens before Bauer brings it to the Edinburgh Fringe show for the month of August.

"Last year was my first time in the Iveagh Gardens and, oh my God, it was f***ing a-mazing. The gigs are so fun - so I'm all in for that - but I also do a podcast with Catherine Bohart [an Irish comic] so she took me around.

"I'm charmed by locally curated museums that don't have a lot of funding and I had heard good things about the National Wax Museum of Ireland and, holy s**t, that was incredible. It's basically three floors, and nobody has curated it or thought about it, so you can meet James Joyce in the same room as Jedward.

"I was obsessed. It's my favourite place I've ever been."

Despite a small falling out with the Irish comics at last year's festival, whereby she took some snacks from backstage ("It's not a good look as the English comic at an Irish festival"), Bauer says she fell in love with Irish crowds and is looking forward to exploring more of the country.

"I am coming back and I think I need to see the toe," she says expectantly.

"Have I been lied to? I feel sometimes Irish people lie to me to see how thick I can be," she says, laughing before insisting that "there's a body and a rotting toe on display in some church".

Eventually, I guess that she's talking about the mummies in the basement of St. Michan's church, but the detail of the toe alludes us.

Reader, if you have the answer, let Helen know following her performance at the Paddy Power comedy festival on Thursday, July 27. Tickets on sale now.