Tommy Tiernan on being serious about comedy and his concerns about the culture of fear in public life

As Tommy Tiernan gets ready for the Marquee, he tells Ellie O’Byrne why he’s not going for shock laughs any more, and his concerns about the culture of fear in public life.

Is there a difference in how you approach huge audiences such as the Marquee in Cork and small crowds at more regular gigs?

I had difficulty playing the Marquee a few years ago. So last year before I went on stage there, I thought about this notion in acting of ‘what’s your objective in each scene?’

I decided my objective was to be creative, and then I loved my time on stage. So it’s the same objective whether you’re playing a 120-seater or 5,000: to make it fun and a creative experience. You naturally adapt to the size of the room then, without conscious effort.

With parts in Derry Girls and the Dave Allen biopic, are you moving towards acting?

To become defined by how you earn your living is a myopic way of looking at people. I earn my living doing stand-up, but I wanted to try other things. It doesn’t mean I’m now an actor, or now a TV host, it’s just trying different things. The most natural thing in the world to me is stand-up, and I think I’ll always do it in some form or another.

Like Dave Allen, you’ve passed commentary on the Irish relationship to the Church. Are you inspired by him?

He’s too good to try and emulate! His stuff was very structured; on television, he was so tight that it’s

impossible to try and emulate that. You’re better off having comedians who are worse than you as your

role models.

Some of his stuff still feels remarkably current, don’t you think?

You have to question things, and to undermine is to question. Dave Allen doing jokes about the Church in the ’70s was the beginning of the process that you could say ended with the divorce, gay marriage and abortion referenda.

You undermine something to see if it has value: if it doesn’t have value, it crumbles, and if it does have value, it stays.

Do you think the abortion referendum result signals a change for Ireland?

I think you can get cornered into a reductionist view of reality. The world is bigger than any one issue. It’s too confusing a country and too unpredictable an existence for us to say, ‘This is what defines us’ any more than any other referendum. It’s an interesting moment in our history.

I was doing material about it before the referendum, but now it’s passed it doesn’t really interest me as a subject any more. What’s next in the alphabet... adoption?!

Do you ever now feel tempted to temper your more outrageous remarks?

For the last show I took three subjects as a writing exercise: abortion, refugees and drugs. My challenge was to come up with something funny about them, to make an entire room laugh, and to feel good about laughing. How can I release the tension that’s around those subjects?

I’m not trying to comedically chase down people who don’t agree with me, and I’m not going to say something so crude that it’s almost a shock laughter: I lived in that hotel for a year or two, and I’ve checked out of it now.

When I’m on stage, it’s always, ‘Whatever comes into your head, you have to say it.’ As you get older and you’ve been through a couple of wars, maybe what comes into your head is a bit more mature, but you’re not in charge of that.

Now, there’s a huge culture of fear. People are so afraid of being singled out for abuse and we almost take pleasure in the abusing: ‘that person is awful, oh look what they did, they’re the worst person in the world,’ and inside we’re going, ‘Thank God it’s not me.’ These are conservative times. The more afraid a culture is, the stronger the backlash when that culture is threatened. If you undermine what a society values, there’s a backlash; there’s a price to be paid.

Is there an impact on your mental health? You’ve talked about your mental health in your stand-up…

I said on stage one time that I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. I was seeing a psychotherapist who said they thought I might have borderline personality Disorder. And I thought to myself, ‘That’s great, that’s something to work with.’ It turns out I don’t have it, but once it was suggested to me in a therapeutic setting, I took it and built stand-up around it.

The reality of my life was that it is not an issue for me, but because I did it on stage, I got invited to all these mental health events. I was going, ‘why are people doing that?’ I’m fine, really.

Maybe it’s because of your candid stand-up style, that people feel they’ve watched you fight your battles. Do people confuse the ‘real you’ with your stage persona?

On stage, there’s always this wavering between truth and not truth. In my new show, there’s a piece evolving about my sexual attraction towards very, very, very fat women. Each time I go on stage, it feels right, and that there’s comedy to be had in it. It’s not mean humour, quite the reverse, but it feels like the mischief is backed up by something.

In reality, I’m a very happily married man. I’m not going out buying magazines and going on websites of women of 40-plus stone, but on stage, I’m playing that character.

That’s one thing I’d change if I was starting over: I’d use a different name on stage.

Your improvised chat show just got picked up for a third season by RTÉ. Are you surprised by its popularity?

I’m genuinely surprised by the reaction. There’s something very vulnerable in it, a huge unknown element with a lot left up to the audience. There’s space in that format to allow things to happen.

One of the issues I have with chat shows is that it’s easy to feel manipulated because they’ve decided beforehand which is the sad section, which is the funny section, which is the serious, current section. It feels too contrived.

What I find is that on my show, the funny bit and the sad bit might be interwoven.

Are you happy?

Never. But that’s ok. The topography of life is up and down: a wonderful, joyous moment and then hours later, worry and stress. But the underlying base of it isn’t about happiness and I wouldn’t know very many people for whom it is: that’s a dangerous philosophy. I’m kind of maniacally unhappy, but there’s great moments in it.

Tommy Tiernan Under The Influence is at Live At The Marquee on Saturday (June 9) at 8pm. www.ticketmaster.ie