Tommy Gun – Tommy Tiernan interview

Tommy Tiernan was the third headliner at Laughs in the Park, alongside Eddie Izzard and Ross Noble. Massive in Ireland, he’s now getting the recognition he deserves in the UK. Victoria Nangle talks to the man

VN: How are you today?
TT: Very well thanks you. Just working on this new show, err, Poot, so I’m just in the middle of that at the moment trying to put it all together.

VN: What does ‘Poot’ (the title of Tommy’s show) mean?
TT: What does Poot mean? Erm…Poot is the name of a Hindu god, with, err, five eyes on the end each of his fingers, erm, he has no eyes on his face…

VN: Oh right.
TT: ….Yeah and only eyes on his fingers. So every time someone asks me what Poot means I come up with a different answer.

VN: [laughs] It makes me think of Mr Toad from The Wind In The Willows.
TT: Oh, does he say poot?

VN: Yeah, he says “poot, poot”.
TT: Oh yes, that’s right, yes, it’s er, Poot is like a big book into which we can throw anything.

VN: [laughs] I imagine you throw it with great vigour…
TT: Yeah, well, maybe…

VN: I was going to ask you, you have so much energy on stage the first time I saw you was about 15 years ago in Smiley’s Comedy Club in North London…
TT: Oh, wow…

VN: ….. and you were headlining there and the last time I saw you was in Laughs in the Park (August 2011) and you seem to have acquired even more energy in that time. How do you do that?
TT: My energy on stage has increased. It’s basically a corresponding graph of despair. The more despair I feel, the more energy the show has. I sort of felt for a while like that got in the way of things; I think I ended up aggressive – over aggressive and over energetic, and you know, I felt the last tour kind of helped me kind of soften up in places. And I know Laughs in the Park was kind of a different experience as it was such a large place to play and I do try to have soft places in the show; it might not have been as easy to achieve within a 2 or 300 feet comedy club, so erm, it’s a constant play between trying to figure a bit about working the room and what the performance needs at any moment or what you feel like doing. But I know it can be easy for me to get too, err, energetic and too aggressive. I’d be weary of that.

VN: Your show doesn’t come across as aggressive to me; it felt incredibly playful but also full of mischief…
TT: That’s good.

VN: Like Pan in the woods or something. It could be incredibly destructive or incredibly constructive…
TT: Yeah, well that kind of figure, and that feeling of a kind of chaos that you don’t know whether to trust or not is a great place to be. It’s dangerous, because I think sometimes you can get into trouble for something on stage. It seems to come with the whole package. I don’t know how easy it is to just select the bits you want from that energy, the stuff that’s safe, sometimes when you inhabit that space, you know, of ‘oh my God, what’s he gonna say next?’ or ‘this is thrilling and totally immoral’ at the same time. But also there’s a generosity of spirit involved. I don’t think, you know, you can pick and choose the safe bits from that energy.

VN: You’re very lyrical. You must come up with fantastic bed-time stories for you’re kids…
TT: I do this thing with my four-year-old daughter, where we each do a line of a story. I would say one part; ‘Once upon a time there was a…’ and she’d finish the next line, and she’s much better at it then I am. I think that my poetic instincts, err, I mean, maybe it’s an Irish thing. I love language and I love talk and playing with words and I love the whole kind of, er, you know, [laughs] I say I love playing with words and then keep saying ‘er’ and ‘erm’ an awful lot. ‘Err’ is my word of the day, err…..

VN: You’re in the middle of writing your show and under pressure right now though…
TT: I love words and I think that I would get as much joy out of a phrase as I would out of a sandwich.

VN: [laughs] That does come across…
TT: Yeah, I love it.

VN: Have you thought about writing a book?
TT: I’m trying to write one at the moment. It’s a collection of shortfictional pieces, humorous pieces, it’s called I am Coffee and it’s gong to be published by Penguin. Hopefully towards the end of next year.

VN: I look forward to that.
TT: Yeah well, when I’m writing [comedy] I don’t try to write things down… my stand up isn’t created like that. It’s not created in that way, it’s more finding stuff to talk about rather then writing a show. So the writing of the book is a different skill and it’s much easier for me to get it wrong in the book because there’s no audience around me to reach in to what actually might be working or not.

VN: It’s different timing?
TT: Completely, yeah. There’s still the delight of word play and stuff like that, but it’s a bit like performing stand up comedy to an empty room. Which is thrilling in a lot of ways but also it’s a bit like playing football by yourself and you have no idea if you’re any good or not.

VN: Your stand-up material essentially covers the three dinner party taboo subjects: religion, politics and sex. Are there any conversational topics that you think of as taboo for whatever reason?
TT:To be honest with you I’m not a great person for dinner parties. I can’t remember the last time I was at one. It’s an Irish thing. Irish people don’t do dinner parties. You know Ireland is such a scarcity for it.

VN: But you chat in the pub?
TT: Yeah, nothing is off limits. I love pub chats and when I’m on the road I tour with the same four people, and we have a couple drinks every night after the show and there’s something about settling down to a couple of pints of Guinness with four fellas; the chats are fantastic and nowhere’s off limits. And you know something? At a dinner party there are rules of conversation, you know? It’s quite a civilised event. Whereas with a drinking conversation the walls of the house disappear and theoretically a calf or a goat could walk up to your elbow and start drinking. That’s not gonna happen at a dinner party, you know what I mean? ‘Cause it’s kind of much more , er, forest struck. I think Pan is more present with a pint than he would be now with volovants and a chicken gratin, so, I’m very at home with alcohol-based conversations.

“And my heart was also on tenterhooks in case he called me an arsehole…”

VN: [laughs] Do you make many friends when you’re drunk?
TT: Not really no, I’m like a prostitute I suppose [laughs]… It’s business, the audience think I like them but really I’m just a ho. I much enjoy being alone and it’s been a huge joy in my lif, the whole experience of people coming up to me that I don’t know, who only know me through my work. I love that actually, and I’m very open to that and I’m not one of those people who is reluctantly famous. I know that in Ireland I’m prepared for those encounters all the time, and I’m very surprised when they happened in England because I’m not very well known there at all. I can walk around the street normally and not have other people looking at me or stuff. Kind of like, you know you walk out of your house and you’re wearing a ridiculous pair of trousers and you know that at any stage of the day – it could be somebody on a train or a hospital or in a playground – somebody will say ‘where did you get those f***ing trousers?’. And they might point at you. So being around Northern Ireland is a bit like that, but in England my trousers are fairly normal. Nobody passes any remarks. I enjoy both; I enjoy the kind of anonymity of being in England, but I’m very open to people coming up to me and I like it.

VN: You’ve won quite a number of comedy accolades. Who’s opinion do you really value?
TT: Oh my God, I don’t know, it’s kind of a compulsive thing to be attracted to people who hate ya’…

VN: [laughs] Is that despair again?
TT: Yeah, that’s weird ‘aint it? You could have out of 100 people you know, you could have 99 people who are really laughing at your stuff and one person not and you’d be inclined to point to the one person and say ‘see, I told you I wasn’t funny’. So there’s an element of that. There’s a moment of laughter on stage, there’s that moment where the joke is working and everything after that is just messy. Because no matter what people come, no matter what people say to you after the show, or your own thoughts about how the show went, they can’t be objective. So afterwards when there’s just a mess of opinions, there can be a general consensus but I try not to rely on that. That moment of laughter, that’s what you live for – that moment of saying something and everybody is laughing and you know that as soon as it passes and you think about what happened it all gets screwed up because you think maybe ‘what was it really like’, or maybe it was a cheap joke or maybe they were just laughing out of politeness…

VN: You’re an anxious whore?
TT: Yeah, I’m kind of like a Mia Farrow whore.

VN: [laughs]
TT: Maybe Mia Farrow… do you remember Mavis from Coronation Street?

VN: Yeah.
TT: [laughs] I’m trying to think of something, I’m actually very nervous, or the girl from Hi-de-Hi, remember her, you know the one with the glasses?

VN: Sue Pollard.
TT: Yeah, I’m a Sue Pollard type of ho. There’s a moment when I know the client is peaking and after that it just becomes confusing.

VN: [laughs] What would you say to your kids if they wanted to do stand up?
TT: Well, my oldest boy is 18 so he wouldn’t but if he did, if he said he wanted to be a stand-up comedian, erm, [pauses] what would I say?

VN: [laughs] Would you encourage him?
TT: Probably not, actually. I’d tell him it’s too lonely a life, and I’d tell him he’d spend too much time away from home and I’d tell him that I’d probably try and dissuade him actually. Even though I have such fantastic experiences on stage – pure, joyous, instinctive, just kind of, bad ballet, I just love it, you know. I’ve had some really really fantastic moments and I guess I’m also very aware of the amount of travel involved, and I have five children so I don’t really admire the fact that I’m away from home so much. So, yeah, you know it’s kind of like heroin – if you ask somebody the feeling of heroin they go it’s absolutely incredible but, you know, I am a bit scruffy.

VN: [laughs] Actually you wear suits now.
TT: You, know I’m not a morose person and I’m not a, very negative man or stuff like that but it’s funny, if my son wanted to do stand-up comedy I’d – I don’t know. You’ve got me stumped on that one. I’m not sure what I’d say.

VN: [laughs] What makes you laugh?
TT: Oh gosh, erm…

VN: Classic question…
TT: Classic question, yeah. [pauses] I’ll tell you what made me laugh this morning. I started to use Twitter and some of the stuff on that makes me laugh. Steve Martin is very funny on it. There’s a few football ones that I like. There’s a song that I discovered last night about me that really made me laugh. Every now and again I just YouTube myself to see what bits of gigs people have put up and I came across this song last night that really made me laugh. It’s called ‘The Ballad of Tommy Tiernan’ and it’s just this guy in a pub singing a song and it really made me laugh. And my heart was also on tenterhooks in case he called me an arsehole or something but it made me laugh. So if you YouTube ‘The Ballad of Tommy Tiernan’ – that made me laugh again this morning.

Tommy Tiernan –?Poot, Pavilion Theatre, Brighton Dome, Friday 14 & Saturday 15 October, 7.45pm, £17, 01273 709709, www.brightoncomedyfestival.co.uk