‘To make another person laugh is less complicated than kissing’ ‘I started running because I tried to rest for five years — that didn’t work’
Tommy Tiernan started out as an actor, before finding a love of stand-up that is like ‘heroin.’ And yet it is acting that has allowed him to feel freedom from having to be funny, writes Emily Hourican
‘IT doesn’t feel too busy; it’s like housework — first you do the kitchen, then you do the hall. You’re doing different things, it’s stimulating.” That’s Tommy Tiernan’s sprightly response when I marvel at just how much he has on at the moment. There’s the stand-up show, Under The Influence, which runs from April in venues around the country; The Tommy Tiernan Show, back on RTE the first week in January; a Druid production of Sive in which he plays matchmaker Thomasheen Sean, opening on January 30 at the Gaiety; a Channel4 series, Derry Girls; a film adaptation of Kevin Barry’s Dark Lies the Island, and a BBC dramatisation of the life and times of comedian Dave Allen. That’s a whole lot of housework. And a very Tommy kind of reaction — considered, thoughtful; for a comedian very serious, but with gleams of mirth and mischief that kick in just often enough.
“I’d always be busy,” he says now, which if you flick through his bio — 22 years of sold-out shows, performances, awards and international recognition — is something of a chronic understatement. “If it’s not work that other people have provided for me, it would be stand-up.”
For all the many and various strands to his career, stand-up seems to be the thing that most inspires him — he likens it to “heroin,” compared with the “herbal tea” of acting — it’s also the thing that gets him into the most trouble. “Stand-up is such an instinctive, bold enterprise. Stand-up has no manners and that’s part of its preciousness,” he says. “You will fumble and falter, you will make mistakes, but every time you step on stage, you surrender to the inclination for mischievousness, that’s what’s precious about it as an art form; nobody will tell it what to do. You’re only worthwhile if you step on stage free; you pay the price for it off-stage, but while you’re onstage, you have to be unhinged and careless.”
This is the bit that can sometimes cause trouble — where something said in the moment is later picked over out of context — and over the years, Tommy has been accused of blasphemy and anti-Semitism, as well as disrespect towards Travellers and the disabled. Clearly, he is guilty of none of these things, and these days he no longer reads reviews. “I stopped reading all reviews a while ago, good or bad,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that I always come off stage satisfied with my performance. There are times when I’ll think ‘I wish that I hadn’t said that,’ but I deal with it there and then, myself. I make up my own mind about it. I don’t need anybody else’s critique on it. I’d be oblivious to it.”
Does it get easier with age, to shrug off unwarranted criticism? “Totally. You might start off in this business looking for affirmation but then you career wildly...” Take the accusation of blasphemy, part of a complaint to the broadcast commission made — and rejected — in 2016, of which Tommy says “It’s a long time ago now, but it wouldn’t have made much impact on me at all.” In fact, when it comes to religion, Tommy describes himself thus: “I would say that I have a faith that goes beyond logic.” Does he go to Mass? “Yes. I love Mass. Just as an experience, it’s so unusual. The things that are talked about at Mass, they’re not talked about on Six One, or Primetime ,or Today with Sean O’Rourke. They’re not even talked about around the kitchen table. I think Mass is a marvellous refuge.”
As for a refuge from what, well: “The daily economic business of Ireland as something to be thinking about and overwhelmed by, is not something that would satisfy me.”
Taking the role of Thomasheen Sean in Sive will be the first time in 25 years “that I have talked with another person on stage,” Tommy says; “I don’t have conversations on stage, I have monologues.”
Does the idea make him nervous? “Oh totally. I was recording the chat show last night, and I get very nervous before each episode of that — worrying, ‘oh my God, I won’t have anything to say to this person…’ I started to think about why we put ourselves through these experiences — why do we volunteer for stress when you could be sticking to the familiar? I know the feeling afterwards is great, and you don’t get the afterwards-great if you don’t go through the before-worry. Or it could be self-loathing? ‘Just put yourself through the wringer, Tommy Tiernan!’”
One of the things that acting, as opposed to stand-up, has brought him is freedom from having to be funny. “What I’ve realised recently, since I’ve started to do the acting, I don’t feel, in TV and radio interviews, as obliged to be funny as I used to,” he says. “Actors, musicians, writers have that freedom; if you go on a chat show as a comedian, you kind of have to do what it says on the tin. I only feel as if I’ve had that ability to not be funny, to not feel the pressure to be funny — I feel that’s a consequence of the acting. If I’m doing serious work, why should I be funny? It feels like such a relief. Thank God for that.”
It’s not that he doesn’t like being funny — “to make another person laugh, and for the two of you to be laughing, I would suggest it’s less complicated than kissing, and the ramifications are less troublesome than kissing” — just that there’s a place for it. “On stage, I love it, making people laugh. But on TV and radio… I would have felt that I had a contract with the Irish public, which is one of ‘you’re funny; we want you to be funny. That’s the gig, are you up for it?’ When I go on to a chat show and I’m not funny, it’s like I’ve broken the contract. It’s like if you visit the doctor and he says, ‘would you mind if I read you some of my poems?’”
It is also, he acknowledges, “a huge privilege”, but adds, very honestly, that “whatever position you find yourself in, after a few years, you get used to it and it’s your normality”. The kind of affirmation he gets “is really unusual, but because it happens every day, you go, ‘it’s normal’, but it’s not. Sometimes, someone has to be with you — you’re walking down the street with one of your kids, and in the space of the walk, four or five people will come up to you and be very complimentary, and you see the look on your kid’s face after the fifth time, and you realise, this is not ordinary. You need to not take it for granted.”
So do his kids think he’s funny? “No. They’re exasperated, because I’m just their dad; ‘Dad, shut up…’ ” Tommy has six children, “the oldest boy is 24 and the youngest is five. Isn’t it amazing?” he says, “there’s been a baby in my life for 25 years. The five-year-old still lives in a land of wonder. He doesn’t have the kind of socio-economic realism the nine-year-old is burdened with. To be in a house where that still happens — the wonder, the luck of that, isn’t it beautiful?” It absolutely is and very endearing that he knows it. “When he moves into the next phase of his life,” Tommy says of
the five-year-old, “it’ll be time for the older kids to start having kids.”
What does he consider to be his job as a father? “I would think about that a lot — that your job as a parent is to provide shelter for your children, at whatever age. You’re a place for them to seek refuge, to be minded. That shelter doesn’t follow your children around; they know where the shelter is and how to find it if they need it. The roof over their head — that loving, caring place of refuge for them.”
Is that the kind of experience he had, when growing up? “I think so,” he says, then qualifies that a little: “Sometimes it’s hard to get shelter from someone who is seeking shelter. Mutual sheltering. All of us, my parents included, we all emerge from our childhood with grudges and pleasantries, everybody does. My kids will emerge from my sheltering going ‘I’m not sure I’m ever going to get over that...’”
But back to comedy, and standup in particular — does he find the limits of what can and can’t be said are starting to creep closer? “The question of what’s say-able and what’s not say-able, that’s an eternal tension in stand-up. I think it depends on the comedian. It’s a two-way thing. I think it’s trust, and if the audience senses that where the performer is coming from is a place of mischief and wonder, they can accept a lot. If they sense there’s a kind of meanness and thin spirit, they won’t.” And, he stresses, “I think the place for that to be judged is in the moment, in the room… there are things that you can say to your partner while making love that are totally inappropriate the following morning over breakfast!”
Anyway, he’s not about to allow this to be more than it needs to be. “The general public, I don’t think, gets involved in it. You go into a bar in Kiltimagh, and I really don’t think it’s as important as the GAA or the weather. That would be my instinct.”
Recently, in his rather mesmerising column for magazine, in which he explores aspects of our lives through the prism of his own, remarkably honest, musings and experiences, Tommy wrote that “there’s nothing wrong with dying”.
It was a curious, and curiously arresting, statement. So what did he mean by it? “Individually and personally, we are so afraid of death,” he says. “It’s everywhere, in terms of what we see every day — dead insects, dead leaves — death is everywhere. It’s an interesting thing to think about. I don’t mean to be flippant about death; it’s something that I would think about — it’s an interesting question, not a conclusion. When people are terminally ill, we come across this awareness that they have accepted death. That must be an amazing place to be.
“I’m not, in any way, minimising the heartbreak, the trauma, of losing a loved one,” he continues, “I just think it’s an interesting one to think about.
“Maybe,” he adds, “we’re a melancholy people, the Irish. Melancholy can be quite an attractive thing in a person. Soft charm is always pleasant to be around, a gentle happiness.” So is he gently happy, I ask? “At times, yes,” he answers, all soft charm.
But only at times. And yet, depression is not a word he uses lightly. “The type of depression I would experience, I think, would be fairly — it wouldn’t be clinical or it wouldn’t be overwhelming in any way. There are people who suffer from depression who can’t get out of bed and are almost rendered mute by it. I imagine that what I go through isn’t unusual in any way at all. I think it’s very ordinary actually. I think there’s a pendulum when it comes to performance that you have to be sensitive to. You experience the natural high, of electric affirmation, where 1,000 people in a room are releasing this incredible energy of laughter, and you’re the orchestrator of it. And then the body has to right itself. The body has to readjust. and the way it readjusts is by going low.”
What does he do, when he feels joy is lacking in his life? “A lot of the time it’s just waiting. A lot of the time, you just curl up like a cat on a windowsill and just rest it out of yourself.”
And other times, he runs. “Physical fitness has definitely had a positive effect on my life. I started about a year and a half, two years ago. I go running, and I do a bit of weights as well.”
What made him start? “I was exhausted,” he says. “I was working three or four days a week and travelling. I was coming home and my energy wasn’t there. For about five years I tried to rest, and that didn’t work, I thought ‘ok, I have to meet this thing head-on.’ I realised, ‘this isn’t going to get better by me doing nothing. It’s only going to get better if I meet this challenge head on and go about creating energy myself rather than waiting for a natural rhythm to occur.” But, he says ruefully, “I have to keep going, it’s not like getting a tattoo.”
There is definitely an inclination — for me, anyway — to make Tommy a kind of Voice of the Irish People; custodian of the national spirit. Would he ever think of himself in that context?
“No I don’t. I’m always amazed at people’s reaction to what I do and perception of what I do. I don’t feel as if I have the platform in that sense. I wouldn’t be someone I would look to! I would look to Paul Durcan for that — who could be horrified at someone seeing him in that way, and he might look to someone else, John Moriarty. But for me, that’s not a thing I’d sense at all.” The Druid production of SIVE by John B. Keane directed by Garry Hynes will run at the Gaiety Theatre from 26th Jan until 3rd March. www.gaietytheatre.ie www.tommedian.com