Thanks to the time difference, it’s past midnight on his side of the world when I speak with Irish Comedian Tommy Tiernan. Nonetheless he’s jovial, generous and (I suspect incurably) honest. There’s plenty of praise and awards for Tiernan’s work, but his Wikipedia entry reads like a bad boy’s school report card. Funny ha ha and funny peculiar.
Thanks to the time difference, it’s past midnight on his side of the world when I speak with Irish Comedian Tommy Tiernan. Nonetheless he’s jovial, generous and (I suspect incurably) honest. There’s plenty of praise and awards for Tiernan’s work, but his Wikipedia entry reads like a bad boy’s school report card. Funny ha ha and funny peculiar.
Tiernan’s no stranger to Melbourne, having toured last year and appeared at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 1997. “I used to drink in a place called Sadies in Chinatown, it was open to about six or seven o’clock in the morning,” says Tiernan. I guess that explains the name of the show, Designer Wino then. “There was never anybody there called Sadie,” he clarifies, and I neglect to ask how he ascertained this as we meander off onto another topic.
Tiernan is looking forward to returning to Australia, and hopefully to Australian audiences. “On the last tour I think it was mainly Irish people that came along,” he says. “I know that when I went to Sydney and when I finished off in New Zealand in Auckland they were the ones where there were more non-Irish people and I think in Perth and in Brisbane and in Melbourne it was mainly Irish. So many Irish people have left Ireland in the past couple of years and I’m delighted to be making contact with them, but even more so to be playing to Australians. I get a big kick out of that.
I don’t think there’s a difference really in the sense of humour. We’re made from the same stuff but you get more sunshine than we do – you’re slightly lighter. We’re like your depressed ADHD cousin that lives in the shed at the bottom of the garden that doesn’t get much sunlight. You’re full of joy and happiness and meeting people; whereas we’re down in the shed writing novels about what..” he trails off. Deciding on, “… about badger raping. So that’s the main difference I think. It’s fantastic for Irish people to come to Australia and find a country that’s as hospitable to our sense of recklessness as Ireland is and there’s not many places that are like that.”
Reckless is one of the tamer adjectives used to describe Tiernan’s style, but it’s one he agrees with. “Aside from reckless I’d say that I very much trust the audience to know my intentions and the problem is I don’t always trust my intentions. I think that I don’t know how to describe my style, my style isn’t a product. I know that ultimately it’s the thing that people pay money to go and watch, but from my perspective it’s not contrived at all so it’s coming from a place in me that provides energy. So I guess I drift towards the things that I’m interested in talking about and I drift towards a style of performing that I find just generates excitement and laughter.”
The lack of scripting fuels the adrenalin rush Tiernan craves when performing, “In order for that to be there, you have to keep taking chances. You have to feel that you’re doing something new that the audience may not have seen before or that you certainly haven’t seen.” As the material grows though, it can take risky directions, a routine about Down Syndrome has copped some flack, and a comment about the Holocaust taken out of context went viral worldwide about a year and a half ago.
Tiernan’s view is that in a nation of multiple tabloid newspapers and talk back shows, but not many people relatively speaking, he’s an easy target. A comment made in front of an audience he’s built a repoire with, in context can be very funny, but as he says, “I think it’s an easy story for a journalist to come along to a show of mine and say something that [at the time] I know what I’m talking about and the audience knows where I’m coming from and it’s funny in that moment. It seems wild and reckless but not if you were there listening to it: you’d understand or you’d trust me or you’d know that it was meant in jest, but when it’s printed on the front page of a newspaper the following day it just becomes something else entirely. It almost becomes indefensible.”
All in all, Tiernan’s taken on the experiences and fed them into a new approach, from a ‘shouty’ manic performance, he’s taken it down a notch, the stage is in darkness but for a spotlight, and his tone and pace varies from loud and fast to soft and slow. One thing’s for sure, you won’t know what’s coming next. Potentially, neither will he.
Tommy Tiernan will perform Designer Wino at The Town Hall on March 30 and 31 and April 1. Book at Ticketmaster – 1300 660 013 and ticketmaster.com.au.
