Tommy Tiernan

A love letter to Irish function rooms

Most of the year, most of the time, I ply my trade in hotel function rooms. They shouldn’t work, but they do.

Stand-up comedy belongs in clubs, you see. Places not as formal as theatres, and a bit more organised than pubs. I like to think there’s a hint of low-level criminality in them. The owner has 35k in cash hidden in a drawer in the office, and probably has access to a gun. One of the bouncers has definitely been in prison, and the other one is definitely on his way.

During the week, they double as strip joints and jazz venues. People sitting down, drinks on the tables; casual, smoke-filled rooms where patrons come to unwind and take part in tiny, controlled rebellion.

Rebellion against the moral constraints of the day. A place to hear counter-cultural ideas wrapped up in wild abandon and verbal inventiveness. The lights are low, the audience is afforded anonymity, the heretic walks onstage and is given permission to undermine. That’s what the crowd want; it’s what they’ve paid for — the opposite of Mass. The Bishop of Divilment has their attention.

They need to breathe, and comedy gives them the space to relax, before they take up the burden of civilised behaviour again the following morning. A culture without these breathing holes is an oppressive one. Every society needs them.

One would hope that there’s a comedy club somewhere in the Vatican, where popes, cardinals, nuns and priests get together once a month to ask scandalous questions

in mischief and delight.

The comedians themselves ought to be permanent outsiders, buying into a way of life rather than a career. A person of no fixed abode, living in motels, always travelling; getting up around lunchtime, not going to bed till dawn, and hanging out with one-legged burlesque dancers.

That’s probably the notion of it that I had in my head starting out 25 years ago, and, to some extent, is still lodged somewhere in my imagination. It’s a very American notion.

I don’t date strippers

The reality, my reality of it, is different, though. Not for me the underground clubs of Chicago and New York, with photographs of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl on the wall. No, you’ll find me in the function room of any decent-sized hotel in any decent-sized town anywhere between Letterkenny and Youghal.

Not for me the motels and waitresses, nor the very late mornings and unending nights. I’m a little more humdrum than that. I don’t date strippers or hang out with junkie saxophonists. I’m a happily married father of six, with monthly mortgage repayments to make, and kids to pick up from school.

These venues shouldn’t work — and, indeed, when English or American comics hear that that’s where I play, they don’t get it. For them, in their countries, these rooms are sterile and corporate. Atmosphere-less and staid, where the intimacy and anarchy needed for good stand-up just isn’t possible, but fine for PowerPoint presentations and Reader’s Digest conventions.

But here, they do work; they are the gathering rooms of the community. Everybody feels comfortable here because they’ve been here a hundred other times for weddings and funerals, 21sts and confirmations, GAA dinners and probably Brendan Grace and Nathan Carter, too.

They’ve spilled drink on the carpet and farted in the seats. They own it — spiritually, if not actually. I’ve had the best gigs of my life in them. Seven hundred people jammed into a room that could fit a hundred more, perhaps, but no point in doing the dog on it. No numbers on the seats, just sit down wherever you want. The bar is open till the show starts, and again at the interval; better get a few pints into you quick, so.

Is that the Chicken Fahy over there in the corner? Jaysus, she’s looking good, the extra few pounds suit her. Look, there’s that tool O’Hanrahan after bringing his mother to the show; she won’t like it. Sure, she’s head of the Legion of Mary.

Settle in, settle in, here he comes. I hear he’s a mad bastard altogether, the cousin saw him in Dundalk... jayz, I hope he does the stuff about the travellers, krazy khunt. Have you not seen it? Google it there on the phone; put in ‘Tommy Tiernan racist’, and it should come up.

Old Irish storytelling took place beside fires and in the places where

the ragged people go. Where all men are equal and none is above the other.

Isn’t it good that they still exist?