Eleanor Tiernan afraid of being a 'dry shite' at Cork Comedy Festival
COMEDIENNE Eleanor Tiernan is a self-confessed people-pleaser. She proves her point by telling me about the day she hopped in a taxi in Dublin, and ended up standing at the side of the road with a bag of the taxi driver’s rubbish.
“At the end of the journey, the taxi driver asked me to take with me, when I was going, the bag of rubbish that he’d had from the whole day.
“But worse is, I said yes! I took the bloody rubbish.” She shakes her head at the memory. There I was, standing on the side of the road with a bag of this man’s rubbish. It’s just that thing of wanting to be the craic all the time.
“There’s fierce pressure in Ireland to be the craic. The worst thing you can get called is a dry shite,” she says.
They say the best of comedy is personal, and Tiernan tells this, and many other unassertive tales, in her new show, appropriately titled ‘People Pleaser’. It’s a characteristic she’s trying to shed.
“It’s poor communication on my part, my saying I’m ok with things and having a whole inner life of: ‘oh shit.’ I’m hoping it’s something that Irish women will kind of identify with.
“We’re conditioned to be good and dutiful and obliging. It’s a stressful thing for the person, though, making decisions all the time. ‘What compromises am I expected to make today’?” She says that she’s trying to be more ‘London’ about her habit, to assert herself in the manner of somebody negotiating life in such an enormous city.
One of our best-known female stand-up comedians, Tiernan has also brought us such colourful characters as court reporter, Ursula McCarthy, and Tiernan’s knack for nailing a punchline has made her a regular on shows like Irish Pictorial Weekly and Bridget & Eamon.
But two years ago, she moved to London, a big call that involved having to return to knocking on doors and asking for gigs. What prompted such a big move? “Loads of things. You’re automatically seen as an economic migrant when you move to a place, but I think that’s very limiting for people.
“I think people are bigger than that and I was probably seeking adventure and creative challenge. Just expanding, broadening horizons — very first-world reasons to move country.
“You know what? Ireland is so great, it’s really hard to move away from. The social fabric and structure is so strong here and I’m lucky to have so many family and friends around, so it’s hard to tear yourself away from that and answer other callings that you might have,” she says.
Although she has regularly won raves and audiences at Edinburgh’s world-famous comedy festival, moving to London meant building her reputation as an entertainer over again, and she was under no illusions it would take work. What she didn’t fully anticipate was how many cultural references in her comedy would need to be amended.
“The UK is so big, I really had to go and introduce myself, knock on doors, go to comedy clubs and say: ‘Can I do your open spot, your tryout?’ It was challenging, the geography… you’re on the road all the time.
“You’re just trying to learn about the culture over there and what makes people excited. It differs more than I would have thought about, before I got there. We get all their culture here. You can’t mention Daithí O’Sé, Richie Kavanagh, and expect them to know who that is. But everybody knows who Ken Barlow is here.
“And the whole thing about Ireland being seen as a Catholic country. That’s not something I think about hugely, because I was brought up Catholic, but I don’t go to mass, I’ve left that very much behind me in adult life.” Many observations about these differences, and how she’s navigated them, find their way into her new show, which is a change of style for her. It’s coming to Cork’s Comedy Festival later this month.
It's here lads. It's finally here -Cork Comedy Fest is officially LIVE 👏 https://t.co/9beGYeqTaJ #lovecork
— Cork Comedy Fest (@corkcomedyfest) August 16, 2017
“It’s a new show, it’s a new style and departure for me. It’s one, long story, about me thinking that if I move to the United Kingdom all my problems will be solved.
“That, sadly, not to be a spoiler for anybody, hasn’t been the case. It’s one long story, told through the form of stand-up.
“It’s pretty biographical. Some of it is very true, and some of it is metaphors for what has happened. When I got there, as well, the whole Brexit situation came very quickly afterwards. I was only there a few months and the whole wave of discussion and conversation about immigrants started to happen. You have certain emotional responses to it, as well,” she says.
Two years after making the move, Tiernan is very content with the balance of living abroad and travelling home regularly for work. “I wasn’t under any illusions. I learnt loads from going over, about people and the world.
“And it’s really nice to be able to see and learn over there, and then come back and be a part of things like Bridget & Eamon, and do gigs like the Electric Picnic.”
Growing up in Kiltoom, on the Roscommon side of Athlone, to a mum who worked for the HSE and a dad who worked for the county council, Tiernan did not consider a career in comedy a possibility, and qualified and worked as an engineer.
When she moved to Dublin, she thought about acting or comedy, but was in her late twenties before she first stood in front of an audience, at Dublin’s Ha’Penny Bridge Inn.
“It was acting that I had originally pursued. But, I suppose, the same as a lot of people, it’s hard to see your way into comedy, because there’s no college course you can do to get into it, so you really just have to go to an open-mic night and put your name down. That’s your first entry into it. It’s the kind of thing that’s very compelling, if you do it once — there’s such a buzz off doing it and doing it well.” Though she describes her first outing as “not an accomplished performance, by any means”, she persisted, and realised that fearing failure was not an option. “The whole thing of failure is probably more mortifying. If you’re not ok with failure, think carefully about doing stand-up. You have to learn to not take yourself too seriously. The English are very good at that. They’re very good at being silly over there.
“Your job is to make everybody laugh and to entertain people, but, sometimes, you can do that and slip a little something self-righteous in there.”
Of the various characters she plays on TV, the one that resonates most is Ursula McCarthy, who featured on Irish Pictorial Weekly. Her reports — complete with uniquely Irish references and quirks — are wacky, but the possibility that they might be true is what makes them so funny. She regularly gets tagged on social media by people wondering if they are real.
Hurrah! https://t.co/Rb0uDqeIlH
— Eleanor Tiernan (@eleanortiernan) September 10, 2017
“I’ll get mentioned in a comment from some discussion that’s being had in East Timor about whether or not this is a real news report from Ireland,” she says. She’s recently completed filming a third series of Bridget & Eamon, and loves working on the show, which is smartly scripted, but also allows for some improvisation.
“I really laugh out loud at the scripts, when I’ve read them. We’ve just shot the third series, which will be going out in the autumn, and that really made me laugh.
“The atmosphere on set is that you would also want to make the people laugh in the room. There is that sense of kind of performing for each other. They want that; that’s why you’re there.
“It’s great that such great writing is coming out of Ireland.”
This year’s Cork Comedy Festival has a lively line-up, with several established and emerging stand-ups performing across the city for four days, from September 21.
The line-up includes Alison Spittle, Barry Murphy, one of the men behind ‘Apres Match’; Irish British-based comedian, Bec Hill, who incorporates art into her routines, and the Lords of Strut, whose ambitions to form the perfect dance routine have made them live favourites.
Established comedians in the festival include Deirdre O’Kane, PJ Gallagher, and Colin Murphy.
Eleanor Tiernan is one of the headliners at the Cork Comedy Festival, September 21-24, www.corkcomedyfest.com
The UK is so big, I really had to go and introduce myself, knock on doors
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