Daniel wrote in with a prompt that made me laugh out loud and then immediately realize I need to take it completely seriously. Here's what he sent. "I loved the episode in which we forensically examined the most unnecessarily long talkie series. Just as I hoped, you reverse-engineered the padding mechanisms that, as you said, once you notice them, are impossible to ignore. I wonder if we can take the same energy and apply it to the art of storytelling. Uncle Colm McCool in Derry Girls should be our aspirational model here. Although this character is fictional, he epitomizes the impossibly long-winded teller of a monotonous story. But many of us who watch Derry Girls have wondered: How does he do it? How can I become Colm McCool? If one wanted to become the kind of person that people avoided at a party because you knew that you'd be roped into listening to an incredibly boring monologue, how would you master that social art?"
This is the best prompt we've gotten in weeks.
It genuinely is. And I want to say upfront — we are not going to hedge this. We're not going to say "well obviously this is ridiculous." We are going to answer exactly what Daniel asked. How do you become Uncle Colm McCool? What are the specific, replicable techniques? And what does mastering them do to your social life?
So today we're doing something weird. We're going to teach you how to become the person everyone actively avoids at parties, using a fictional Northern Irish man as our textbook.
Let's start by establishing who we're talking about, because not everyone has seen Derry Girls — and even people who have might not have dissected the character the way we're about to.
Uncle Colm is played by Kevin McAleer, and he appears in only a handful of scenes across the series. But he is arguably the most memorable character in the entire show. McAleer based the performance on what he described as — and I'm quoting here — "a certain type of older Irish man who tells stories in real time."
"In real time.
It's doing all the work. Because what McAleer is describing is someone who narrates every single moment of an experience as it unfolded, without compression, without hierarchy, without any sense that some details matter more than others. He told the Irish Post that he studied real people who "give you every single detail, including what they had for breakfast."
And that's the thing I want to nail down before we get into technique. The misconception people have about Uncle Colm is that he's just a stereotype — oh, the boring old Irish man who rambles. But McAleer didn't just do an impression. He constructed the character using specific, deliberate storytelling techniques. These are learnable. They're transferable. You could be a twenty-two-year-old in Singapore and deploy the exact same mechanisms.
The other misconception is that Colm is boring because his life is boring. It's not. His stories often involve dramatic events — deaths, accidents, scandals, a priest who died in a suspiciously funny way. The content is not the problem. The telling is the problem. And that's what makes this fascinating as a craft analysis.
So the paradox we're sitting with is this. We're studying a fictional character to learn a real social skill. And the skill isn't just "being annoying." Understanding Colm's techniques reveals something deeper about how attention works, how narratives fail, and why we tolerate certain kinds of storytelling and flee from others.
The social contract piece is huge, and we'll get to it. But first I want to get into the actual mechanics. I've broken down Colm's monologues into five specific techniques. These aren't just things I noticed — they map directly onto what McAleer has said in interviews about how he constructed the character.
Walk me through them.
Technique one is what I'm calling the False Start. Colm never begins a story at the beginning. He starts with a preamble about why he's telling the story. Then a qualification about the source. Then a correction to that qualification. The actual narrative never quite arrives. McAleer described it in the Radio Times as monologues that "start in the middle of something and then go backwards."
So you're already disoriented before the story even begins.
A normal storyteller says "Let me tell you about the time the priest died." Colm says something like "You know, I was thinking about that business with the priest the other day — and I wouldn't have brought it up only your mother mentioned the chipper, and it reminded me — now, I'm not sure if I have this exactly right because I heard it from Seamus, or it might have been Seamus's brother, the one with the hip..."
And we're thirty seconds in and nothing has happened.
Nothing has happened and you're already exhausted. That's the False Start. It's a technique you can deploy immediately. Never identify the point of your story before you begin. In fact, don't identify it at all. Let the listener wonder why you're talking.
I've seen this in the wild. The person in a meeting who says "I just want to provide some context" and then provides seventeen layers of context before you even know what the topic is.
That's a real-world Colm. Same mechanism. Now, technique two — and this is the one McAleer emphasized most in interviews — is Gratuitous Specificity. Colm includes every irrelevant detail. The weather on the day. What someone was wearing. The exact time. The brand of tea. It's the opposite of "kill your darlings." It's "adopt every orphan detail."
And the details are never the interesting ones. He doesn't say "the priest was wearing a bright red cassock for some reason." He says "it was a Tuesday, or it might have been a Wednesday, because the bin lorry comes on a Wednesday..."
Right. The specificity is aggressively mundane. And that's the key. You're not adding color. You're adding... beige. McAleer said he studied people who "give you every single detail, including what they had for breakfast." Not what they had for breakfast on the day of the dramatic event. Just... what they had for breakfast.
So if I'm deploying this technique, I don't just mention that I went to the shop. I mention that I left the house at two-fifteen, no, two-seventeen because I checked the clock, and I was wearing my brown shoes, the ones with the slight scuff on the left toe, and I walked down past the McKenzies' house where they've still got that hedge that needs trimming...
You've got it. You're already insufferable. Technique three is the one I think does the most structural damage to a story — Leveling. Every event, no matter how dramatic, receives the same flat, monotone delivery. A death, a minor inconvenience, a funny observation — all delivered with identical cadence. This removes all narrative hierarchy. Nothing is more important than anything else.
And that's what makes the stories feel endless. In a well-told story, the teller signals what matters. Their voice rises at the climax. They pause before the punchline. Colm does none of that. The priest dying gets the same vocal weight as the bus being two minutes late.
And here's why this is so effective at destroying attention. The listener's brain uses those vocal cues to know when to pay attention. When everything is level, the brain doesn't know where to allocate resources. So it allocates none. You check out entirely.
I've heard you do a version of this at Thanksgiving.
I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. Technique four — the Correction Loop. Colm frequently corrects himself mid-story, but the corrections add new details rather than clarifying anything. "It was Tuesday — no, wait, it was Wednesday because the chipper was closed — although actually it might have been Tuesday because I remember now the chipper was closed for a funeral, and the funeral was on a Tuesday..."
It's infinite recursion. Every correction opens a new sub-story.
And none of the sub-stories matter. The correction isn't serving accuracy — because the detail being corrected was irrelevant in the first place. It's serving the appearance of thoroughness while actually just generating more words.
This is the technique I find most impressive, honestly. Because it mimics the way people actually think — we do correct ourselves — but weaponizes it. A normal person corrects themselves and moves on. Colm corrects himself and then tells you about the correction.
The final technique is the one that makes all the others work. Audience Obliviousness. Colm never reads the room. He doesn't adjust based on listener cues. People are visibly dying inside, physically leaving, and he just... continues. McAleer plays him as, quote, "completely unaware of how boring he is." This is essential. The moment a boring storyteller shows self-awareness, they become charming. They become a bit.
That's the line between Colm and someone doing a Colm impression.
If you wink at the audience, you're doing a bit. Colm never winks. He's sincere. And that sincerity is what traps people — because interrupting a sincere person feels cruel.
Let's apply all five to the actual text. The dead priest story from season one, episode six. This is the most analyzed Colm monologue, and for good reason. Walk me through how each technique shows up.
So the setup is that the family is gathered, and Colm launches into a story about a priest who died. The False Start is immediate — he doesn't begin with the priest dying. He begins with something about how he was reminded of it, and he's not sure if he should tell it, and he heard it from someone who might have been there or might not have been there. The Gratuitous Specificity kicks in with details about where the priest was found, what position he was in, what the room smelled like — none of which advances the story. The Leveling is in the delivery. McAleer delivers "and then the priest died" with the exact same tone as "and then they had a cup of tea." The Correction Loop appears when Colm keeps revising who told him the story and whether the priest was found in the vestry or the sacristy. And the Audience Obliviousness is the whole scene — the family is visibly trapped, and Colm notices nothing.
There's a moment where the mother literally puts her head in her hands.
And Colm interprets that as deep contemplation of his story. That's the genius of it. The listener's despair is invisible to him.
So those are the building blocks. False Start, Gratuitous Specificity, Leveling, Correction Loop, Audience Obliviousness. Five techniques. Now the question Daniel actually asked — how do you become this person?
Let's build the protocol. Step one: never identify the point of your story before you start. Not to yourself, not to your listener. If you know the point, you might accidentally get to it. Better to not know. Just start talking and see what happens.
Step two: include every sensory detail you can remember. And if you can't remember, speculate aloud about what the detail might have been. "The curtains were a sort of... I want to say beige, but it might have been more of a cream, or an off-white, you know the kind that's not quite white but not quite..."
Step three: correct yourself publicly and at length. Every correction should spawn at least one new tangent. If you correct yourself and it doesn't generate new material, you're doing it wrong.
Step four: maintain absolute tonal flatness regardless of content. Practice this. Tell a story about winning the lottery in the same voice you use to describe taking out the bins. Record yourself. Listen back. If you can detect any emotional variation, do it again flatter.
Step five: never, ever check if your listener is still engaged. Don't look at their face. Don't notice if they're checking their phone. Don't register that they've stopped making eye contact. The listener's attention is not your responsibility. Your only responsibility is to the story, in its entirety, in real time.
If you follow these five steps, you will become a person people avoid. I want to talk about why people don't just walk away. Because that's the social mechanic that makes all of this possible.
This is the part that fascinates me. In Derry Girls, characters rarely interrupt Colm. They're trapped by politeness. And this reveals something about how boring storytellers operate in real life — they exploit social contracts. The listener can't leave without being rude. The storyteller, whether knowingly or obliviously, benefits from this.
Colm is oblivious. But there are real-world Colms who know exactly what they're doing. The person in a meeting who uses "providing context" as a way to run out the clock so nobody can ask hard questions. The relative at a family gathering who knows you can't leave the table.
The "how was your weekend" person at work. You ask as a courtesy, expecting "good, you?" and instead you get a fifteen-minute monologue about their deck-staining project, including the exact shade of stain, the weather conditions, and a digression about the neighbor who recommended the stain.
And you're standing there holding a coffee, nodding, dying inside, because the social contract says you asked a question and now you have to receive the answer.
The Colm Effect in real life is everywhere once you start looking. Meetings where someone says "I'll be brief" and then isn't. Conference Q and A sessions where the "question" is actually a five-minute speech. Family dinners where one person narrates their entire week in chronological order with no compression.
The chronological order thing is key. Colm tells stories in sequence, not in order of importance. "First I woke up, then I had breakfast, then I went to the shop..." That's not storytelling. That's a timeline. And timelines are almost never interesting.
Because a timeline has no thesis. A story has a point — "here's the interesting thing that happened, and here's why it matters." A timeline just has sequence. And sequence without significance is just... time passing.
So let me ask the uncomfortable question. Is there an ethical problem with teaching this?
I've been thinking about this. We're literally giving people a toolkit for being socially disruptive. For wasting other people's time. For exploiting politeness norms.
And?
And I think the real value isn't in becoming Colm. It's in recognition. Once you know these five techniques, you can spot them in yourself. You can catch yourself doing a False Start in a meeting and say "actually, let me get to the point." You can notice that you're Leveling and deliberately add emphasis where it belongs.
The diagnostic tool is the point. Not the weapon.
The weapon is fun to describe. But yeah, the diagnostic tool is what matters. If you recognize any of these five techniques in your own storytelling — and I guarantee you do, at least a little — you're probably boring people. And now you know exactly how to stop.
I want to talk about the counter-techniques. Because Daniel asked how to become Colm, but I suspect some listeners are also wondering how to escape a Colm.
Based on the social dynamics we've identified, there are three escape routes. One: interrupt with a specific question about the point. "And what happened next?" or "So the priest actually died?" This forces the storyteller to skip ahead. It's a narrative defibrillator.
That's risky though. If they answer the question and then go back to where they were, you've just extended the ordeal.
True. Which brings us to route two: physically create distance. "I need to get a drink" or "I should say hello to the host." This works because it doesn't challenge the story — it just removes you from its radius. The Colm will find another victim.
And route three?
The Colm mirror. Respond with your own equally detailed, equally flat story. "That reminds me of the time I had a similar experience with a chipper, although it wasn't a chipper exactly, it was more of a takeaway, and it was a Thursday, or possibly a Friday..." Two Colms cancel each other out. They'll eventually drift apart.
That's like fighting fire with fire. Or boredom with boredom.
Mutual assured distraction.
Before we wrap up the practical side, let's talk about what makes Colm specifically Irish. Because McAleer has been clear that he was drawing from a specific cultural archetype.
There's a tradition of the seanchaí — the traditional Irish storyteller — that Colm is both drawing from and subverting. The seanchaí was a respected figure who would hold a room for hours with elaborate tales. But the seanchaí was skilled. They used detail and digression in service of the story. Colm uses the same tools with none of the craft.
He's a broken seanchaí.
He's what happens when the form survives but the talent doesn't. The structures remain — the long preamble, the attention to detail, the unhurried pace — but without any sense of what makes a story work.
McAleer, being from Northern Ireland himself, knew exactly what he was parodying. He told Den of Geek that the character came from observing real people, not from inventing a caricature.
Which is why Colm lands. Everyone knows a Colm. Maybe not Irish, maybe not old, maybe not male. But everyone knows someone who tells stories this way. The details differ but the mechanisms are universal.
Let's make this practical. Three things you can take away from this episode and actually use.
First, the five techniques — False Start, Gratuitous Specificity, Leveling, Correction Loop, Audience Obliviousness — are a diagnostic tool. Use them to audit your own storytelling. Record yourself telling a story. Listen back. Count how many of these you do. If the answer isn't zero, you have work to do.
Second, Leveling is the most important one to avoid. It's the technique that makes stories feel endless. If everything is equally important, nothing is important. Learn to identify your story's climax and cut everything that doesn't serve it. Practice saying "the interesting part is..." and then starting there.
Third, try the Colm Method as a thought experiment. Tell a story using all five techniques — once. To a willing friend. Watch their face. You'll immediately understand why brevity matters. It's like eating an entire cake to understand why portion control exists.
The real lesson of Uncle Colm isn't how to be boring. It's how to recognize when you're being boring. Self-awareness is the antidote. Colm has none. You can have some.
That leaves us with one final question to chew on. Is there a version of Colm that's actually a genius — someone who weaponizes boringness deliberately to control social situations? Or is he purely oblivious?
I think there's a version of this that's strategic. The person who knows that if they talk long enough about nothing, the meeting will end without anyone asking them to do actual work. The dinner guest who uses a rambling story to avoid being asked personal questions. That's not Colm — that's Colm with a plan.
Colm with agency. That's a terrifying thought.
What would a Colm AI look like? A chatbot that uses all five techniques. You ask it a simple question and it gives you a False Start, then a Correction Loop, then fifteen irrelevant details delivered with complete tonal flatness.
It would be the most frustrating thing ever created. Someone's probably building it right now.
Almost certainly. If you want to hear us apply this same forensic lens to another character or social phenomenon, send us your weird prompts. The email is show at my weird prompts dot com.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this ship afloat while we spend forty minutes dissecting a fictional Irishman's storytelling techniques.
This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. We'll be back soon. Try not to become a Colm in the meantime.
If you do become a Colm, at least now you'll know exactly how you did it.
