THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: TOMMY TIERNAN:People threatened to kill Tommy Tiernan after he made jokes about Jews last year. Now he's financially "f***ed" and his comedy is less angry – but not softer
FOR SOMEONE WHO has been hung out to dry on Liveline, Joe Duffy's RTÉ phone-in, more times than he can remember, Tommy Tiernan has settled into a certain routine when controversy breaks. He bunkers down and waits for the phone call. He knows it is coming, and he knows it won't be pleasant. "When the phone rings the day after it's always my father, and I know what's in store," he says. "One time I just couldn't face the call, so I got my friend to answer the phone and to say I was in the shower. My father said, 'So, Tom's in the shower, is he? Well, tell him to wash his f***in' mouth out with soap.' "
Last year, though, it wasn’t the usual pillorying. During an interview at the Electric Picnic festival he was asked about anti-Semitism. In his reply he spoke about the nature of his material and how it can cause offence. “It’s all about being reckless and irresponsible and joyful. It’s not about being careful . . . It’s trusting your own soul and allowing whatever lunacy is inside you to come out in a special protected environment where people know that nothing is being taken seriously.”
And then came the controversial rant, which Tiernan has since explained as “an example of my argument”: “These Jews, these f***in’ Jew c***s, came up to me,” he explained. “F***in’ Christ-killing b*****ds! F***in’ six million? I would have got 10 or 12 million out of that. No f***in’ problem!”
The heavens of moral indignation opened on him both here and abroad. The “scandalous Irish comic” made the front page of the Jerusalem Post, tours were cancelled in North America and boycotts were organised.
“My wife took the brunt of it, because she’s also my manager. I was protected from it all in a sense, because I was doing my World Tour of Mayo. Friends from Dublin were ringing and saying, ‘You’re on every radio station and in every newspaper – you’re in surround sound down here. But I had 300 people waiting in a west-of-Ireland hotel room for me. All I could do was keep on gigging. And take my beating.”
But some things he couldn’t protect himself from. “A week after the story broke I was in my back garden in Galway,” he says. “It was one of those beautiful autumn evenings, and I could see my wife, Yvonne, in the kitchen and see my two youngest kids playing. My phone rang, and I swear to God this is what happened. This man introduced himself as the head of this elite Garda group that no one knows exists. These are like beyond Special Branch police – they’re linked up with the CIA and MI5. He said to me, ‘Tommy Tiernan, we have reason to believe that two people are on their way from Germany to kill you.’ I didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything. There was this magnificent pause. Then he said, ‘We’re not taking this too seriously. But if anything does happen to you, well, we told you.’ It was just unreal.”
He seems more interested in the sort of people who make up this elite Garda unit than the content of the message. "You can just see them there, can't you, sitting around all day, watching The Bourne Identityon DVD over and over again and still not understanding it."
He talks about how some of his colleagues treated him. “Certain people on the comedy circuit wouldn’t talk to me. It’s not fair to give names, but a certain Irish comedian rang me up and said, ‘I can’t work with you ever again.’ ”
Sitting in a Dublin hotel dressed like New York-era John Lennon, and happy to yap about anything and everything, he is by turns philosophical, introspective, mischievous and still a bit bewildered by how he became such a figure of opprobrium.
“I was pulled off shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and a whole Canadian tour was cancelled.” (In Canada, Tiernan is known as the “Bono of Irish comedy”.) “For me the whole thing was like some lunacy had been released. I remember getting a letter from the Canadian Jewish Congress saying I was blacklisted in all of North America and if I performed over there they would organise boycotts of the shows.”
The explanation he gave at the time for his Holocaust rant appeared on his website. He said that he was “greatly upset by the thought that these comments have caused hurt to others”, that his rant “took place as an example of [his] argument” and that out of context the words were “callous, cruel and ignorant”.
This wasn’t enough to satisfy venue bookers and managers in North America, where, though not a household name, he has a considerable following. It was put to him that talking to the head of the Canadian Jewish Congress might help defuse the situation. “A meeting was set up. The head of the Jewish congress wanted to meet me at the Holocaust museum in Toronto,” he says. “For me this wasn’t an act of contrition. When we met he told me his point of view and I told him my perspective. I wasn’t going to ‘apologise’ and I wasn’t going to not apologise – if you know what I mean – because I didn’t think an ‘apology’ was part of what was going on.”
He toured Canada last summer. “In the shows I talked about what happened. I would open by saying, ‘Are there any Jews in tonight?’ and in a crowd of 300 people there would always be some Jewish people. Then I’d say, ‘Just a few. That’s the way I like it. Enough to be respected but not enough so as you’re telling me what to do.’ And they loved that. The reason I asked that question is because the opening story I do now is all about a Hasidic Jewish rabbi. It’s a beautiful story taken from Jewish mythology, and the background needs explaining to non-Jewish people.”
He dismisses the idea that the Electric Picnic incident might have reined him in as a comic and made his material more circumspect. “No, there’s no sense of retreat, no sense of firelessness, no sense of impotency with the new material,” he says. “What there is, though, is a new sense of playfulness, but that was going to happen anyway. After all that had happened I did have to sit down and think to myself, What am I really trying to do here with my stand-up? What am I really trying to say?
“After the last big tour” – the Bovinity show – “I found myself trapped in a certain style. I was getting frustrated by that swinging-my-fists style of stand-up. I’m not as demonically angry about things now. I’m not as destructive. Destruction is good, like in punk rock, where there was a certain nobility to it. But you can only go so far by destroying the place. With the new stuff I hate to use the word ‘mellow’, because that implies that it’s without an edge, that it’s softer, that it’s Ronnie Corbett stuff, and that’s not the case.
“I suppose I’m mellow in the sense of a single-malt whiskey that has matured nicely. I’m not like a young whiskey which is angry and burns your throat. So, yes, there is a playfulness about the new show. There’s more fun there. I’m not swinging my fists so much. The box I was in was getting too small for me. But I certainly don’t feel that I’ve reeled myself in.”
ALTHOUGH IT MAYseem that he has been in a bunker for the past 12 months, Tiernan has been touring the world and getting some of his best reviews. "When the Canadian tour was cancelled I went out on an Australian tour and then on to a UK tour. And I went back to the Edinburgh festival in the summer. The reviews were amazing; everything went really well. The BBC were in, and they offered me my own TV show – 'You're amazing, we want to work with you,' all that Edinburgh plámás."
Two big TV shows came calling: Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshowand Live at the Apollo. "The McIntyre spot went great, but when I did Live at the Apollo I opened with the Hasidic Jew Rabbi material, and it died on its arse. There're always some famous people in the audience on Live at the Apollo, and by famous I mean Peter Shilton was there. I could see him looking at me doing the Hasidic Jew story and thinking, What the f*** are you on about? In fact all the 3,000 people in the audience were looking at me going, What the f*** are you on about? One or two people got it, I could see that, but that's not great: two people out of 3,000. What had worked so brilliantly in Edinburgh just didn't work with these 3,000 people who were raised on mainstream, down-the-line, pre-watershed comedy. You get that now, mainstream clean-cut kids with their clean-cut comedy, and that's fine – it's pop-music stand-up – but I like to think there's still room for something else.
“I did a show with Rich Hall, and he’s like the Sam Shepard of stand-up. I was listening to Neil Young’s new album the other day; he’s in his 60s now, and he’s still f***ing around with feedback. I hope there’s always room for that. I hope there’s always room for me!”
For Tiernan, stand-up was never a light-entertainment anteroom before a TV- presenting job came along. “I’m in love with the art form of stand-up,” he says. “Years before I became a comic I was obsessed by Lenny Bruce. I would listen to the tapes over and over again. I didn’t really understand everything he was on about, but I loved the rhythm of it. And I still listen to loads of stand-up. The other night it was Greg Proops, and I love to go to bed to Tom Waits doing his spoken-word material. It is true that the vast majority of stand-ups, when they get successful, get distracted and go into other fields of work. But that won’t be me.”
He talks with an almost evangelical zeal about the possibilities of stand-up. “I don’t want to overanalyse it,” he says before doing just that. He refers to great jazz musicians, obscure philosophers and Jungian psychological theory as lodestars, and parses and dissects books, films and records relevant to his comedic cause. He pulls literary quotes out of the air, frequently saying: “I don’t really know what that means, but it sounds great, doesn’t it?”
A window of wonder opened for him when he did his first show. “When I started doing all this, with some gigs in Galway, it was in the winter of 1995. I was 26, and was considered long-term unemployed by the dole office, and had my first child,” he says. “From the very first gigs I knew I had to have a point of view or perspective that wasn’t already out there. I had to come at things from a certain angle. I’d get ideas, notions into my head; I was always trying something different. What was the last thing? I was wondering what performing bits of my favourite songs would do to the show – how would it push it along? Seriously. You’ll look at anything, take anything, just to push it on.”
AFTER SEVENand a half years of sobriety he's back drinking. "I was on holidays, and I was restless and pacing around. It's just the odd glass of wine . . . and the odd pint. It's not a big deal. I'm not mullering into it like I used to."
Restlessness is a problem. “I do a certain block of shows with days off in between. But on those days off I find that, come seven or eight o’clock, I’m up, pacing around. I’ll grab the remote for the TV and watch something for a few seconds, then switch it off and pace around again. Then I’ll pick up the remote again.”
Financially, he says, he’s “f***ed”. “I’m up to my arse in mortgage repayments. Problem was, like a lot of people, I overspent when I had the money. It’s not something I think about. It doesn’t shape my day; it doesn’t bother me. I don’t feel depressed by it. My way of dealing with financial difficulties is to accept that, yes, what we’re all going through right now is real, is undeniable, is unpleasant, but it’s not the whole story. There is a bigger picture. Once our eyes get accustomed to the dark we’ll find it’s actually a better place to be . . .
“There’s something Dr Ivor Browne says which is more apt than ever now. He describes Ireland as being an adolescent, and what’s happening now is as a result of us behaving like adolescents with money. And this is such a dramatic conversation we’re having with ourselves at the moment – and it’s the only story people are capable of telling. I flew back into Knock from the UK the other week and was driving home to Galway. I was flicking between the Sunday-morning radio chat shows – RTÉ, Newstalk, Today FM. There was such a self-flagellating orgy of misery going on I couldn’t switch it off: it was compulsive listening. But then you think: This is actually entirely irrelevant. Utterly irrelevant.”
A lot of his new show is given over to our financial ruin. “I start off the show and there’s this spotlight, this perfect circle of light, around the microphone. I do a minute or two in the spotlight and then do 20 minutes in the dark. Our politicians and leaders only seem capable of working from and dreaming in that small circle of light. But I’m standing over in the darkness, saying, ‘This is a better place to be.’
“I got this from a great old story about a guy who loses his front-door keys. He’s looking for them under a lamp post outside his house. A policeman comes over to help him, but they can’t find the keys. The policeman suggests they move away from the lamp post and look somewhere else, but the guy says, ‘No, we’ll never find them in the darkness.’
“There’s a line in the new show: ‘I’d rather be playing an invisible fiddle in the dark and presume you can hear it than succumb to a life of rationality and logic.’ He reurns to the idea at the end of the show. “The house lights and stage lights are turned off. There’s no light. We are in total darkness. I come back on, and I play an invisible fiddle. And the audience can hear it.”
Tommy Tiernan: A life
- Born in 1969 in Donegal, Tommy Tiernan spent his first eight years between Zambia and London, as his father travelled for work. When he was eight his family settled in Navan, where he went to the same school as Hector Ó hEochagáin and Dylan Moran. He later went to Garbally College, in Ballinasloe.
- He was working as an actor in Galway when he became a comedian. In 1996 he won the So You Think You're Funny comedy competition in Edinburgh, followed by the Perrier award (centre row, left) two years later.
- He has three children from a 15-year relationship with Jayme Street. When the couple separated he married Yvonne McMahon (now his manager, bottom row, left) in 2009. They have two young children.
- He was just back from his honeymoon when he went to Electric Picnic in September last year and was asked a question about anti-Semitism (bottom row, right).
