TOMMY TIERNAN was back on form last night as he took his new stand-up show ‘Tommedian’ to Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. As has been the comic’s wont in recent years, punters were required to surrender their phones in the form of Yondr lock-bags before taking their seats.
It was clear from the generalised murmur that many attendees had not been expecting this. Nevertheless, as the comedian himself rightly observed – taking to the stage around 9:30 pm – “It stops you from filming snippets of the show and uploading them without context.”
He joked: “And for those of you with babysitters, anything bad which is going to happen has already happened.”
The show opened with support from Sligo funny man John Colleary. The IFTA-nominated co-writer of RTÉ sketch shows like ‘The Savage Eye’ and ‘Irish Pictorial Weekly’ eviscerated his host city’s multitude of strange accents and sectarian peccadilloes; burrowing into Ireland’s fractious relationship with everything from sex to hotel turn-down services.
Tommy Tiernan has been quoted as saying that Colleary is his ‘favourite comedian’, and it’s easy to see why. Much of Tiernan’s own set – at least for the first twenty minutes – picked up on observations earlier made by Colleary.
“The Donegal accent is the most musical, easy-going sound on the island,” he said. “Then you get to Belfast and the Protestant influence makes it catch in the throat!”
There were jokes about Lutheran asceticism, bits about how Fermanagh should be surrendered to the Republic by the British State since it ‘has nothing going for it beyond a bit of fishin’!’
Though Tiernan has visibly mellowed since the chaos of his early days when ‘Loose’ and ‘Cracked’ were on almost every Irish household’s DVD shelf, he finished with a wonderful sketch on how teenagers and young people should be allowed their moment of wildness, to be able to make their own mistakes. This, Tiernan implied, was what freedom was all about.
“My generation had drink and drugs, the generation after that had ecstasy and MDMA, the generation after that had weed and cocaine. Now there’s nothing and the kids are more fucking anxious than ever!”
To put a career-defining theme on Tommy Tiernan’s unique brand of razor sharp wit and surreal observation would be an impossible task, though much of his comedy undoubtedly has to do with moving and revaluating our notions of individuality.
The hangovers associated with rigid Church-State control and sectarianism in the North have not gone away, and figures like Tiernan and Colleary are welcome reminders to keep an eye on the canary in the coalmine. We have not achieved full freedom yet, they seem to say, but so long as we keep pushing, we might still get there.
See More: Belfast, John Colleary, Tommy Tiernan, Waterfront Hall
