Irishman David Nihill feared public speaking before he found stand-up. Now he won't stop talking

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If David Nihill was a philosopher, his credo might be “I digress, therefore I am.”Instead, Nihill is a comedian.Kind of.

“I don’t know if I think of myself in those terms,” says Nihill, whose “Cultural Appreciation” special has 2.5 million views on YouTube.“I wouldn’t even call mine comedy specials.”Nihill is a conversational storyteller who rarely even moves on stage.

“I don’t know how to do performance,” he says, “but I do know how to talk.”His current show, “Taking Tangents,” which takes him to Irvine, Pasadena and Los Angeles from March 13 to 17, is a wide-ranging collection of tales, with some material shifting from show to show.We’ll come back to it, but first, a few tangents.Growing up in Ireland, Nihill, 47, struggled to learn, hampered by dyslexia — “I came in the lowest five percentile in the whole country of Ireland for spelling, and I didn’t even spell my name right on the test” — and an aversion to math.

He was made to feel inferior because of his difficulties.“I was 100% in the ‘I am a moron’ category,” he says.Nihill was shoved into a vocational program and most of his friends dropped out of school.

He stayed in, but even when his father offered to buy him a Super Nintendo for certain math scores, Nihill fell short.His father bought it for him anyway, he says, “but I sold it and bought myself a motorcycle even though I was 15 and not legally old enough to drive.”He finished high school and became a poorly paid, overworked apprentice electrician.

That was enough to motivate him to go to college; there, he figured out how his brain worked and how to learn.He even developed a passion for reading: His last show, “Shelf Life,” wove in dozens of book recommendations.During our conversation via video after a New York show, I’d ask one question, then follow Nihill as he ambled through his personal history...