Severe Jam Damage

Tommy Tiernan
Vicar st - Dec 6 2007

Is this what comedy has come to in a Politically Correct world?

Not funny - he even admits that if we want to hear something ‘witty’ we should go and read Wilde - but shocking. And to be honest not all that shocking. This is nothing you haven’t already heard done by other comedians, or down the pub some night when inhibitions are down and people are drunkenly rambling. Tiernan brings it to the stage - the shocking thing here isn’t the ‘jokes’ he makes (nor the price of the tickets) but the fact that he is SCREAMING at you.

Tiernan bounces around the stage shouting and eventually working himself up into a RANT with his oddly shaped stories - half finished, mostly forgotten and full of tangents. At one point he begins telling us that humans used to be trees and blackbirds and flowers and everything on the earth is connected.
‘I breathe out and my breath goes in your feet and up into your chest. We’re ALL F’ing CONNECTED. HUMANS WERE ONCE TREES, that is FACT. We walked into the church away from the blackbirds, but there wasn’t room for all of us. Patrick called us in to listen to his bell -BONG!- and we turned our back on Oisin. We should have brought the church outside to the trees.’
Later he stands at the edge of the stage softly muttering ‘Godbewithyou, Godsaveyou, Godbewithyou, Godblessyou’ for what seems an eternity.
‘Now doesn’t that sound more pleasing than’ and here he takes up the stance of a priest on an altar arms outstretched, his voice pitched high and nasal twang ‘And on the 3rd day he rose again and again and again and he was up and down every three days…’
The audience laughs. I don’t get it, is it a joke or is he trying to convert us all to Druidism?

He likens the auditorium to a Bus. ‘The Comedy Bus’.
‘I’M THE DRIVER AND YOU’VE PAID ME FOR THIS RIDE. YOU ARE GIVING ME PERMISSION TO TAKE YOU WHEREVER I WANNA GO. HANG ON FUCKERS. THE BRAKES ARE OUT, YOU’VE THROWN OFF YOUR SEAT BELTS AND WE ARE PROBABLY GONNA CRASH.’

He has been villified by the press ever since he first shat all over RTE’s Holiest of Holy’s namely The Late, Late Show aka Uncle Gaybo’s Olde Time Family Hour.* And like all good self-publicists he revels in it.
‘Are there any tabloid journos out there?’ he screams. ‘Well here’s the Down Syndrome bit.’
And he then (I have to admit it) does a piece that is indeed quite witty, despite his protestations that he doesn’t ‘do witty things’. Yes, he imitates the mannerisms and speech of a person with down syndrome. But in the end you begin to wish you could meet this character he has created. Because they think he is as big a prick as the rest of us and he comes off looking the fool in this piece - and then:
‘Why doesn’t anyone talk about the girl who was raped and wasn’t allowed to give evidence in court because she had downs syndrome? Why doesn’t Joe F’ing Duffy have THAT on his F’ing show?’
The crowd goes into a frenzy of applause. I can understand what he is saying - yes, these kids should have the same rights as any citizen of Ireland, but he’s preaching to a bunch of drunks. This is not a ‘comedy bus’ - it is Tiernan’s personal church.
Some drunk in the row behind us who has already spilled his beer all over us shouts ‘SLAG THE PRIESTS’
‘We’ve had enough of them’ says Tiernan dismissively. ‘We’ve given them five or six hundred years already.’

He tells us that he’s clean, he’s off the drink and the coke.
‘Why did you stop?’ someone shouts out, trying to outfunny the funnyman.
He stares hard at her. ‘ARE YOU F’ing MAD? DO YOU REALLY HAVE TO F’ing ASK ME THAT? YOU KNOW IN THE DARKEST PLACE OF YOUR MIND THE REASONS I MIGHT HAVE FOR STOPPING. YOU NEVER ASK SOMEONE WHY THEY F’ing STOPPED.’

The rest of the performance is as you would expect. Crude and vulgar and ranting. He reams the front few rows of the audience a new ar£se hole.

The Ross O’Carroll Kelly-alike who is recording the show on his mobile phone:
‘DID YOU NOT HEAR THE F Ing ANNOUNCEMENT BEFORE THE SHOW YOU F’ing PRICK? TURN OFF YOUR F’ing GADGETS. REWIND THE TAPE! I’M UP HERE TRYING TO TALK TO YOU, NOT YOUR F’ing GADGET. YOU EVEN F’ing SMILED AT ME WHILE YOU WERE RECORDING IT. GIVE ME THE F’ing PHONE OR TURN THE F’ing THING OFF. YOU F’ing PRICK.’
To the drunk woman who spends almost the entire show shouting things up to the stage over his performance:
‘SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU F’ing WENCH! I’VE ONLY GOT ANOTHER 10 MINUTES AND THEN YOU CAN FUCK OFF BACK TO THE BAR. PLEASE, I’m ASKING YOU TO SHUT THE FUCK UP. TELLING ME YOU ARE GOING TO SHUT UP IS NOT SHUTTING UP.’
The girl in the front row who went out to the loo and then swanned back into the show, coming the long way across the front of the stage in the low cut top - who then got ‘insulted’ and ‘embarrassed’ when he screamed ‘BOUNCING JIGGLY JUGS RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME! OH HOLY GOD!’ and then spent 10 minutes telling her exactly what he wanted to do to her.
‘HAVE YOU GOT CHILDREN? NO?? SELFISH F’ing BITCH!’
She was in the bar afterwards swanning around with a supercilious smile on her face - Queen Jiggly Jugs. Her friend - who tried the same manouvre about twenty minutes later, but due to her high necked t-shirt got no love from Tiernan - is relegated to the status of Handmaid.

At the end of the show all of those whom he had insulted were the ones to give him a standing ovation. Thrilled that they now had a story to tell in the pub, their own personal red-top banner.
‘TOMMY TIERNAN REAMED ME IN FRONT OF A THOUSAND PEOPLE.’

And that’s what struck me. The audience weren’t laughing because what he said was funny - although the drunks behind me might not agree. It was the laughter of a crowd who didn’t know what else to do.
‘Oh F, is this what we’ve become? The lowest common denominator.’
And for those who were pierced by Tiernan’s vulgar arrows:
‘Look at me world, I’m SOMEBODY - Tommy Tiernan spat bile all over me.’

Tiernan’s ‘comedy bus’ gave the people in the auditorium the ‘freedom’ to laugh at things that society says we shouldn’t be laughing at. Like the bold kids at the back of the class, sniggering at the teacher’s laddered tights and over-rouged cheeks.

*The first time Tiernan appeared on Ireland’s longest running television show ‘The Late, Late Show’ his set included a joke about the Lamb of God - being an actual Lamb that bounded round the field full of its own self importance because it was a lamb that had been chosen by God. This outraged holy Catholic Ireland and the next day the national papers ran with the story that he was to be sued for Blasphemy.