Getting Personal With The Jokerman
Mike Fitzpatrick Talks To Tommy Tiernan Ahead Of His Appearance At The Comix Comedy Club In New York
You know, we could just go overboard with the superlatives and the County Meath references (folk down Navan, Kells and Trim-way will tell you they go hand-in-hand anyway) when describing Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan, or indeed, we could just let the man himself get a word in.
The Irish Examiner’s Mike Fitzpatrick caught up with Tommy, the man who’s sold more DVDs than any other act (besides U2, naturally) in Ireland, as he prepared for another side-splitting assault on the Big Apple. And you know something? He’s not quite as mad as they say. Well, maybe just a little bit.
Mike Fitzpatrick (MF): You’re performing in New York later this month?
Tommy Tiernan (TT): I’m actually performing in Navan tonight, my home town and then New York next week. You know, I’ve never headlined at a comedy club there before, I’ve done theater work there, and ten-minute spots and stuff like that, but never my own night at a comedy club, so to speak, so I’m really looking forward to it.
It’s the only country in the world where they really do comedy properly, the States, it’s kind of the home of nightclub comedy. I was over there last March, I think it was, and played at Town Hall. And when you have that amount of people, it’s very hard to be intimate, or to react to something any individual says, the show (at a larger venue) has to be kind of pumped up, slightly anonymous, from a performer’s point of view.
So, even though I’ve already done a six-week run in New York a few years ago and the Town Hall last year, for me, going to New York to headline a comedy club, is a big thrill, and I hope to do a lot more of it, rather than do the theaters, which slightly formalizes the whole experience.
Stand-up comedy is fantastic in stand-up comedy clubs, and that’s kind of where it belongs. The best live stand-up comedy albums were recorded in small rooms.
MF: What can you remember about your first impressions of the city?
TT: The first time I was in New York, I did an unannounced spot at a comedy club in front of about six Mexicans. Probably slightly easier than a Navan audience.
I remember once I stayed up all night in New York, and I couldn’t believe the smell of the city the first thing in the morning. An unbelievable stench at about half five.
I was staying at the Gansevoort Hotel, it was kind of a salubrious place, down near Union Square. There were a lot of quite famous people staying there, and I came out of the hotel and there was a load of paparazzi, and the hotel itself is very dark. Obviously, the more expensive the hotel, the darker it is.
You could be standing beside Naomi Campbell and not know it, so I went over to this photographer, and I put my hand on his arm, and said: ‘Excuse me, do you know who’s inside?’ And he turned to me and said, ‘I have no idea, and don’t ever f***in’ touch me again’. So, I find New Yorkers very helpful, very eager for conversation, but also, there are certain lines you don’t cross. Like touching people on the arms.
MF: What is it that somebody needs to venture into Stand-up comedy?
TT: There needs to be a huge want in your life. The tongue needs to be hanging out of you looking for love! That’s one side of it. I think you also have to have a kind of generosity of spirit. A sense of humor is something you can develop, like a way of looking at the world and a way of seeing people. But the first two you need to be born with.
MF: You’d a memorable cameo in ‘Father Ted’. Do you see yourself venturing into television again?
TT: Well, that’s funny, I’ve just been offered a TV show by the BBC. I don’t know if I’m going to do it or not. I suppose years ago if you got a TV show you were guaranteed a huge crowd at your gig, and that became the aim for a lot of people.
My aim has just been to try to do great stand-up. If you’re able to do one thing well, like if you’re a great plumber, people don’t ask you to tile roofs, or to landscape gardens. But if you’re a great comedian, people ask you to host television shows and to act.
Just because you can do one, doesn’t mean you can do the other two, and my talent lies in stand-up, it doesn’t lie anywhere else really.
MF: Is there a performer that you’ve particularly enjoyed watching recently?
TT: There’s a woman called Eddi Reader, who I think is just unbelievable. I was on holiday in County Cork, and she was playing in someone’s garden, and it was phenomenal. I’d never seen a performer like her, really funny stories and great music.
There’s a few American guys that I listen to a lot too. Doug Stanhope, and a guy called Doug Benson, and Demitri Martin, they’re the three guys I really like. I trawl iTunes looking for good stand-ups, and I find them. You know there’s some people out there doing some great work, some wild work, taking chances, advancing the art in a very effortless way.
There’s a few American guys that I listen to a lot too. Doug Stanhope, and a guy called Doug Benson, and Demitri Martin, they’re the three guys I really like. I trawl iTunes looking for good stand-ups, and I find them. You know there’s some people out there doing some great work, some wild work, taking chances, advancing the art in a very effortless way.
MF: You’re a fan of Lenny Bruce, what other comedians have you admired over the years?
TT: Lenny Bruce I know, was Mr. Trouble. But also, I’d be a big fan of Bill Cosby’s stand-up as well. I mean his story-shaping was unbelievable. The stories he told about his brother, and Fat Albert, were just fantastic.
I listen to a lot of old American stand-up, a lot of Jackie Mason, he’s brilliant. There’s a great woman I discovered recently, just in the past month. She was famous in America in the ’60s, her name was LaWanda Page. She played a character called (Aunt Esther in ‘Sanford and Son’). She did stand-up, you know the call and response thing, with the African-American preachers. You know, the ‘I believe in Lord Jesus’ and the crowd responds, that fantastic style of oratory, well she does that, except it’s filth. It’s fantastic, I’d absolutely recommend it. It’s on iTunes, just filth. ‘You tell them, mother*****rs, I say you tell them mother******s…’. So, I’m always discovering people like that, that I really like.
MF: Are you a fan of situation comedy?
TT: Not really, I didn’t watch much telly. I’d watch a lot of movies, but in terms of sitcoms, as a kid obviously, ‘Cheers’, you know when your parents would let you watch ‘Cheers’ it was fantastic. Not really anymore.
I’d a brief look at ‘Two and a Half Men’, but it’s not really my cup of tea.
MF: Has Irish and British comedy changed in the past number of years?
TT: Well, it’s going through an evangelical stage at the moment, English stand-up. I’m not sure if people in America are wise to this but stand-up comedy went underground in England for about ten years.
Just in the past two or three years there’s been, I’d say, four or five shows maybe even more, with stand-up comedians on them, and you have guys, clean-cut kids, their humor is broad, family-based, kind of ordinary observational humor, and they’re playing 10,000-seaters, and it’s because comedy disappeared for a while and all of a sudden there’s a generation of people who’d never seen stand-up comedy before.
MF: How do you think comedy differs on either side of the Atlantic?
TT: I don’t know really, I think that Irish audiences are more used to general waffle. So, you can kind of string a story out a bit longer for an Irish audience. American audiences tend to be slightly more (demanding) maybe?
It’s a big thrill for me to go to places where everything is different, you know, to get out of the comfort zone as often as I can. It’s funny, but no matter how you try and I can come up with generalizations about comedy around the world, and comedy in the States, but there are comics in America who are doing as varied a type of work as you’d ever see. I don’t think there’s one particular type of comedy on either side of the Atlantic.
MF: The mid 1990s saw the emergence of yourself, Ardal O’Hanlon, Graham Norton, Pat Shortt and Dylan Moran, do you consider that era something of a golden age in Irish comedy?
TT: It’s hard to see people coming through the way we all did back then. We all came through though independent of one another, D’Unbelievables worked on a completely different circuit than the ones the stand-ups were doing. Dylan was mainly working in England, I was working in Ireland, Graham was doing the TV route.
Maybe there was nobody ahead of us when we started, the only ones (on the scene when we were starting) were Sean Hughes and the cabaret circuit, but there wasn’t alternative stand-ups like there are now. Sometimes I’ll do a club date in England or America when I’m not on the bill and I go out and there’s no Irish people in the room, I love that, I love the challenge of that and still being able to leave an impression on the room and making them laugh.
I get fierce proud of Irish people and I’m very proud to play to them and very proud that they come to see me when I’m abroad. I would have a lot of sympathy and a lot of fire in my belly for an Irish crowd.
MF: Some time ago, you made a move to radio, how’d you enjoy that?
TT: Well, I stopped doing that actually, because I found that stand-up was what I loved doing the most, and I lost a little bit of my soul every day doing (radio).
That kind of sounds weird, but when you’re doing things in front of an audience, you get that immediate feedback, you kind of know what you’re doing, you have control of it to a certain degree.
It’s a relationship that you can work on, but when you’re doing it to the whole country, and there’s no one in the room with you apart from (co-host) Hector, it wasn’t my thing. I was very grateful to do it with Hector, who makes me laugh, probably more than anyone. Radio wouldn’t be a long-term thing for me now. Nicest place I’ve visited but I wouldn’t want to live there. As my dad said about heroin.
In the States you have this huge middle ground, but there’s this wild stuff on the edges. I wouldn’t go along with the view that Americans are easily offended. Maybe the middle part of America, I don’t mean geographically, the middle of the road Americans, are very easily shocked, much more so than Irish people.
MF: What have you come to expect from American audiences?
TT: You could make a very broad generalization and say that American audiences are more literal and ‘easily-shockable’, but the audience that goes to see Doug Stanhope, or even Doug Benson, wouldn’t be like that at all.
In the States you have this huge middle ground, but there’s this wild stuff on the edges. I wouldn’t go along with the view that Americans are easily offended. Maybe the middle part of America, I don’t mean geographically, the middle of the road Americans, are very easily shocked, much more so than Irish people.
I think they probably have more in common with the people who live in the south of England, they have a belief in the way they think things should be, and I know Americans have a great belief in manners, and being brought up right and positive thinking, that kind of thing. If you go against the grain, then I think the middle ground will find it quite shocking.
MF:: A different outlook than in Ireland?
TT: The edge in America is wilder than anywhere else, probably because the middle is so conservative. In Ireland, the edge isn’t that wild, but the middle is. It’s almost like punk in Ireland, it didn’t have the same kind of effect as it did in other countries. There’s a lunacy to middle Ireland.
You know, middle Ireland drinks a lot, every family has a couple of alcoholics. Every extended family has one child whose father is not his father. We have a very on-off and on again relationship with mental health. We’re kind of self-destructive and we drink a lot, so punk, it was a little bit mad, but it wasn’t as shocking as it was to middle posh England, or like someone like Marilyn Manson would be to middle America. So, yeah, that’s my theory for today!
MF: You’ve had your share of controversy, is that something you just manage to move on from?
TT: Yeah and you know, it’s never premeditated. What gets me into trouble is, trusting the audience. The last time I did the Letterman Show, I had this line, I was talking about when one woman was upset and all her girlfriends gather around to protect her.
And I painted this scenario of a woman upstairs in her house crying, and it had a line where there were a lot of fat lesbians walking around the house with machine guns in case a ‘man-bastard’ happened to walk by.
So I wanted to do the piece on Letterman, but they told me that I couldn’t call the lesbians fat, because they’d be inundated with calls from gay rights groups, stereotyping lesbians as fat.
There was another one where I wasn’t allowed use the word ‘lunatic’, because I’d have been exploiting mental health. It doesn’t make easy talking, but you get a television show like that, which is conservative up to its eyebrows, but it’s hosted by someone who is the funniest most irreverent guy on mainstream television. It’s amazing that the two things can co-exist. I mean if it was the Bill O’Reilly show, or what’s your man’s name, Glenn Beck, you’d kind of understand it, but Letterman?!