Here's the last of three excerpts from our interview with Irish comedy genius, Tommy Tiernan. You can read the lot in the latest print edition of The Big List. Enjoy!
...That tour also saw Tommy talking about letting in "the darkness", about keeping what was being said inside the room, locked indoors. Ahead of the furious gigs that would follow, Tommy would tell the audience that what worked in this room wouldn't work outside; taunting the 'devilment' that led to much of the controversy and of course, huge laughs. "The last Bovinity tour was kind of an angry tour and you can get burnt if you get too close to that. With this one the doors aren't locked, the doors are open, there's fresh air in the building, but we're still trying to burn, you know. Actually Jesus Christ, I don't know what I'm talking about here! [laughs]." Tommy is someone who doesn’t like to indulge in self-analysis, but we still wanted to know not so much why people found him funny, but what he thought was funny about him. "It's not really about why do I think I'm funny or not, it's more about if I can find enough stuff that makes me laugh. Sometimes something stupid and slapstick is funny. I used to do this line people liked: 'We're all vulnerable – even the Dalai Lama is only a line of cheap speed away from being an arsehole'. Something like that, there's a bit of cleverness in it. It's worked out - a well written line. But at the minute I do an impression of a man with no teeth giving out to God and that really makes me laugh. That's not clever at all, it's just daft. So it's a mixture of everything. So with that in mind, what did he feel was the best joke or routine he'd come up with? "It's more the experience of doing something. The experience right now of doing the old man with no teeth talking to god, I love doing that. I love the experience of it rather than me going I nailed a bit of material. "Sometimes I look back at pieces of material people have enjoyed from previous shows and that, but that's kind of depressing to me, 'cause I don't know how I came up with them, and I'm thinking 'Jesus, how I'm going to repeat that'. "I'm more about tying to enjoy what I do now, and maybe those bits will have the same effect on people. But I tend not to look back with pleasure on stuff. The way my head is at the moment, sometimes I look back on stuff that's gone very well and I feel under pressure to come up with similar stuff." Finally, one of the most recent sketches by Tommy was on the recession. Was it easier or harder to make people laugh during the current tough times? "I think we all, as a country and as an Island, we're very comfortable with disaster and talking about how terrible things are. We knock great craic out of bad times. In a weird way, so in terms of making people laugh about the recession, the only think you want to stop is it becoming safe or predictable or stuff that people have heard before. "There has to be fresh air in it. There's a line in the show as well, that my kind of theory is the worse things are, the better off we are and that we're only five of six bad decisions away from freedom. So rather than trying to get things right we should have the defiance to keep getting them wrong. At least we'll end up in a place we couldn't predict [laughs]. Tommy Tiernan appears with an extra show due to demand in the Ulster Hall on July 29. Tickets are available from www.ulsterhall.co.uk or by calling 028 9033 4455.
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