Radio: Tommy Tiernan’s dangerous comedy is no laughing matter

It is an occupation with a job description so hair-raising that you’d wonder why anyone would want to do it. Practitioners of the profession bandy about terms such as “dangerous”, “scary” and “like playing Russian roulette” to evoke the perilous nature of their work. What kind of job, you might wonder, could warrant such a startling portrayal? Firefighter? Disaster relief worker? War correspondent?

Pah. The fearless souls who confront these hazards are comedians, at least if one is to believe The Tommy Tiernan Show (2FM, Saturday), where host and guests speak about their vocation in the manner of tough-as-teak war veterans. And there was you thinking stand-up comics just told jokes.

Broadcasting live from the Sugar Club in Dublin, Tiernan presents an “improvised chat show” – he doesn’t know the identity of his guests until they walk on stage. “What could possibly go wrong?” Tiernan says to the club audience, chuckling.

It’s a hook that chimes with the notion of comedians as swashbuckling outliers. At least it is until it emerges that his guests, Ross Noble and Aisling Bea, are also comics, enabling them all to get on with the risky task of swapping gags and talking shop. Tiernan quizzes Noble about his brand of improvised comedy – “There’s no safety net,” the host breathlessly remarks – and wonders whether it’s “a search for a buzz”.

He praises Bea for pursuing a “beautiful”, “democratic” and “unpredictable” art form while showing his own impulsive side with such original questions as “Who inspires you?” and “Are you ambitious?”

As it happens the show highlights a real hazard faced by stand-ups: that of not being funny. In his opening riff Tiernan recounts visiting Sherkin Island the previous week, when he “had the realisation that the craic could kill you”. He adds that if he went to a doctor he would be told to go somewhere that there’s no craic. Gold.

Tiernan continually plays up his seditious self-image, even quipping that he grew his beard “as an act of civil disobedience”. But when he ventures near the knuckle it merely leaves a sour taste. Bea talks about the UK stand-up scene having a community atmosphere, only for the host to dub it a “kind of Special Olympics of comedy”. Other targets are similarly soft, with cracks about Bruce Jenner and “tramps”. This kind of humour may make people uncomfortable, but it’s not subversive. It really isn’t.

But Tiernan often achieves the stand-up’s primary aim of making the audience laugh: a constant stream of yucks accompanies his patter. There are some very funny moments, too, particularly when he is riffing with the reliably surreal Noble. But for too much of the time the only danger for Tiernan is that listeners might switch stations from boredom.

There's no tedium on Sunday With Miriam (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday), as Germaine Greer proves that she still has the power to provoke and enthral, 45 years after the publication of her groundbreaking book, The Female Eunuch.

Miriam O’Callaghan’s conversation with the Australian feminist author is by turns angry, confessional, thoughtful and, yes, subversive. Reflecting on the lot of women, Greer suggests, in typically florid terms, that little has changed since 1970.

Women are still domesticated, Greer says, “by castrating them mentally and spiritually”. By way of proof she notes that even a powerful woman like Angela Merkel does not “enunciate a single feminist principle”.

Enduringly fiery though her take on gender politics is, Greer is even more compelling when reflecting on her own life. She talks about not being able to have children and recalls, with perhaps too much openness, her mother’s “manifest unhappiness and destructive behaviour”. After revealing that she was physically abused by her mother, Greer says she can forgive her for that but not for the abuse inflicted on her father in his old age.

O’Callaghan is alive to the apparent contradictions of her guest’s account. “You portray a bleak portrait of marriage,” O’Callaghan notes, “but in your own life you flip that over and say that it was your mother who mistreated your father.”

Greer, in turn, flips this over, and talks instead about the prevalence of elder abuse, before reiterating that marriage is a “hopeless institution”. “I don’t know why gay people want to get married,” she says, exasperated.

The interview brings out O’Callaghan’s best probing instincts, but she still lobs in a few fluffy cushions as questions, asking Greer about the importance of love in her life and, ahem, what she thinks about Kim Kardashian.

But it’s a riveting encounter, even when Greer is at her most provocative, such as her questionable, if apparently sincere, assertion that suicide is a sign of rage rather than of unhappiness.

Greer also displays a wicked sense of humour. She recalls getting in trouble as a pupil at convent school and being asked by the mother superior whether she wished to be a great saint or a great sinner. “And I had the most dreadful temptation to say a great sinner, because it sounded so much more interesting.”

On this evidence she remains incapable of being dull. Someone should give her a chat show.

Moment of the Week: Limerick’s good Samaritan

On Tuesday Ryan Tubridy (2FM, weekdays) talks to Shauna O’Riordan, the 19-year-old Limerick woman who, the week before, had stopped a man from taking his life by jumping into the Shannon. Her account is remarkable. Seeing the young man climb on to the bridge, she held his legs even as others, shockingly, continued to pass by. In tears, O’Riordan tried to convince the man that there was help and support for his “temporary problem”. When two men finally helped her, “I grabbed his face and said, ‘You look at me – you do not even know me, and look at the effect you’re having on me.’ ” It’s an act of true heroism. An admiring Tubridy calls her an angel. It helps that she seems a tough cookie, too.

radioreview@irishtimes.com