Tommy Tiernan doubles down on optimistic Cork

When I started secondary school at the turn of the century, Tommy Tiernan was the number one comedian we all quoted to each other at lunch break, so to get the chance to interview him 25 years later was surreal to say the least.

These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a true raconteur amidst the ranks of popular new comedians. In a time when comedy can often feel rehearsed, refined, perfected, and prescribed to a fault, it feels good to know that Tommy, the windswept wild man from the midlands, is still out there chiselling away at the world, plucking yarns from his well-stocked arsenal with no setlist in sight.

After his initial show at Live at the Marquee in Cork on 5 July sold out in no time, Tommy has added a second show on 4 July, much to the relief of his legions of loyal fans here on Leeside.

Tommy and Cork go way back. Not only did he do his first proper professional gig here at the City Limits Comedy Club in the early ‘90s, he actually lived in the city during the late ‘80s.

“The Cork I remember back in the day was quite tough,” he recalled.

“I don't mean physically though. Now, it was the late 1980s, so there wasn't a fierce amount going on really, you know? I had good pals back then; I was hanging out with people who were going to the RTC (now MTU) as it was known, and I did a bit of work with the Simon Community.

“I remember it as being… bleak is too strong of a word, but it was kind of hard going, but since I started gigging down there, which would have happened about eight years later, I always feel a little like I'm on my holidays when I come to Cork,” said the Navan native.

There is, however, an optimism here in Cork that Tommy struggles to put his finger on, and as a man who’s been around the block a fair few times, there are few alive better poised to describe the county to county quirks of our nation.

“The tempo of the place (Cork) is upbeat and it's very hard to describe and it's not found anywhere else. No other city in the country has it. Every other city has its charms and strengths. Limerick is a great city for sport; Galway is a great city for pints; Belfast is a great city for concrete - anybody who loves concrete, you should go to Belfast; and Dublin is good for shopping, but Cork has this kind of… I don't know, there's a kind of spirit about the place. It feels local,” he said.

Tommy describes his latest show, ‘Tommedian’ as being “unpredictable” and something that is, in many ways, out of his control. Unlike many comedians who will simply tell you a joke or a story and move on to the next thing, Tommy never shies away from getting stuck into the meaning behind the laughter. If, like me, you have followed his whole career, there were always signs of a deep thinker lurking behind those mischievous eyes, as though he was always seeing what he could get away with both comedically and intellectually, while being careful to keep it all warmly wrapped up in a big blanket of charming devilment.

“It's always unpredictable and I have the choice of about 20 or 30 stories when I go out each night, and I might only end up doing between 10 and 15 of them so it's all up for grabs,” he said.

“They've done these studies in quantum physics. There was a big investigation into the nature of attention and how attention affects the thing that is being observed. When I go out onto the stage, I'm receiving the audience’s attention so, say in the Marquee, you have 4,000 people and they're focused for the most part on you – that changes me in a way that I can't control and in a way that I can't predict, and that's a very real thing. The obvious proof of it would be that if I walked out on to the stage in the Marquee at 2pm in the afternoon, I'd just be a bloke in a car park,” he laughed.

Since the early days of his career, I was curious to know if Tommy was still doing what he does for the same reasons that drove him as a young man – if that promised land still looked the same now as it did in 1990s Ireland. I also wanted to know if he, in his wildest dreams, had ever imagined the level of success he would achieve here in Ireland. Turns out he had.

He said: “I think when I started it was pure joy and instinct and it was very exciting because it was new. The first professional gig I ever did was in cork actually in the brilliant City Limits Comedy Club - Christmas 1995 - and I remember travelling down on the bus from Galway feeling like a kind of a combination of Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac.

“I'll tell you what I didn't have, was a sense of career. You start off with all those megalomaniac fantasies, and I still don't have a sense of career, and I think there are people getting into stand up now who have a very strong sense of, ‘I want to do this, I want to do that’,” he added.

Tommy was brought up in the ‘70s and ‘80s and received a Catholic education. When he left school, most of his friends moved straight to England to find work while a recession raged in Ireland.

He continued: “We didn't really have the triumphant sense of self that people have now. We’d have been lucky to have one identity between the lot of us!

“There's a huge sense now of the successful life and it's being sold to us all the time. It's being sold to our children. I remember one of my sons was a mad Ronaldo fan, and Ronaldo - I mean, he's a fine man - but he's all about, ‘I am this and I am that and I am amazing and I am Ronaldo’, and that somehow gets into kids’ systems and they go, well, ‘I have to be somebody’. When I was growing up, I mean, we had Dave O'Leary - a nation holds its breath. There was more a sense of collective. The individual pursuit of a career, it just wasn't part of the thinking when I started,” he said.

Asked what the key to longevity is in his line of work, Tommy said it’s often the slower, more studied route that allows for the longest journey, citing Cork comic Chris Kent, who will play his first ever Live at the Marquee gig on 11 July, as a good example.

He said: “Chris is somebody who I think has taken the steady road, the slower road that we all took. Chris didn't just burst out after only doing stand up for 20 minutes, so you'd imagine someone like Chris will last because he's such a fantastic comic and is all the time getting better and better as a comic and his profile is all the time increasing.”