Abstract
Tommy Tiernan enters through an open upstage door for his performance at Vicar Street, Dublin, 2004. He moves downstage, covering the space from left to right as he welcomes the audience and thanks them for coming. The stage space is inhabited by what could be regarded as a theatrical set, hinting at the comic’s flair for the dramatic.1 Tiernan tells the audience that the set design means “fuck all... it’s just something for ye to look at while I’m thinking.”2 Tiernan is dressed casually. He is sporting a full beard and wearing jeans, sneakers, and a paisley-patterned, salmon-coloured shirt. He is also wearing what he describes as a “hippity hoppety” earpiece, so that there is no traditional microphone or stand in this performance.3 Having thus acknowledged the audience, Tiernan gets down promptly to the evening’s comic events. Before very long, the agenda turns to the business of religion, and Tiernan devotes whole sections of this performance to that dialogue with the audience. Throughout his career, ideas of religion, faith and spirituality have recurred in Tiernan’s performance works and his material choices have landed him in some very hot water, both at home and abroad. This is highlighted, for example, by his experience while performing a routine focusing on religiously themed material in Baltimore, America in 2006 when the comic was appearing there as part of his Jokerman tour.4 After a few moments on a meagre stage and as part of an open-mic spot, Tiernan turned to a discussion of Jesus, his crucifixion and the Jewish Holocaust:
I’m a big believer in Jesus. I know Jesus is very popular with black people and Jewish people... some people like the movie The Passion of the Christ (moans from audience). And some people didn’t like the movie... because it somehow insinuated that it was the Jews that killed Jesus. Well, it wasn’t the fucking Mexicans.5
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Notes
Tommy Tiernan, Cracked: Live at Vicar Street (Galway: Mabinog), 2004), 00.50–00.54.
Simon Critchley, On Humour: Thinking in Action (Oxon: Routledge), 2002) p. 4.
Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of It? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy (Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications), 2002) p. 42.
Oliver Double, Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (UK: Methuen Drama, 2005), p. 207.
Susanne Colleary, ‘God’s Comic,’ in Staging Thought: Essays on Irish Theatre, Scholarship and Practice, ed. by Rhona Trench (Bern: Peter Lang), 2012), pp. 153–69 (pp. 155–6).
The theory of humour as incongruity can be traced as far back as Francis Hutcheson’s Reflections upon Laughter in 1750. Immanuel Kant, the Earl of Shaftsbury and Arthur Schopenhauer also made significant contributions to incongruity theories. For a comprehensive treatment of the three classic theories of humour, see Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage Publications), 2005), pp. 37–110.
Other works of interest are Andrew Stott, Comedy: The New Critical Idiom (Oxon: Routledge), 2005), pp. 127–45
Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1997). See also Simon Critchley, On Humour, pp. 3–6.
Cynthia True, American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story (London: Sidgwick & Jackson), 2002), p. 178.
Tommy Tiernan, Loose (Galway: Mabinog), 2005), 1.16–1.24.
Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (London: University of California Press), 1985), p. 173.
See Bert O. States, ‘The Actors Presence: Three Phenomenal Modes’, Theatre Journal, 35 (1983), 359–75 (p. 359). Also Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, pp 170–82 (p. 181).
Briefly, Helmuth Plessner’s argued that laughter confirms that humans are eccentric and that ‘the humanity of the human’ is irrevocably bound to the curse of reflection. In other words, humans have the singular ability to occupy a critical position in relation to oneself, a position that often inspires laughter at oneself or indeed others. This is a position that cannot be occupied by animals although there are those who disagree with Plessner’s thinking, including among others, Simon Critchley and Mary Douglas. See Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying, trans by James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene (Illinois: Northwestern University Press), 1970), Simon Critchley, On Humour, pp. 25–38, Andrew Stott, Comedy, pp. 11–12.
Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the theory of carnival in his book Rabelais and His World, written in the 1930s and published in 1965. Embodied in the free space of marketplace, although sanctioned by the hegemonic order, the laughter of carnival can be represented as ambivalence towards official culture, so we understand that ‘in the carnival, dogma, hegemony and authority are dispersed through ridicule and laughter.’ Within the itinerary of carnival festivities we encounter a ludic celebration of macabre humour (pregnant Death) and the grotesque body, which Bakhtin believed, contrary to Gnostic ideology, held the promise of true salvation. Bakhtin’s belief in ‘grotesque realism’ proclaims to the world that the power of carnivalistic laughter is trans-temporal and universal, but that the carnival free space of play is the place in which the ‘drama of the body’ is enacted by and for the populace. Bakhtin argued for the ‘The drama of birth, coitus, death, growing, eating drinking, and evacuation. This corporeal drama applies not to the private, individual body, but rather to the larger collective one of the folk.’ It is within the free space and free time that is the carnival space of play that a ‘myth of ambivalence’ is created that denies death in and through the power of laughter. For further discussions on Bakhtin’s concept of carnival see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky trans. By Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1984).
Also, see Renate Lachmann, Raoul Eshelman, and Marc Davis, ‘Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture’, Cultural Critique, 11 (1988–1989), 115–152 (pp. 124–30).
Thomas Nagel quoted in Bob Plant, ‘Absurdity, Incongruity and Laughter’, Philosophy, 84 (2009), 111–34 (p. 131).
See Bob Berky and Claude Barbre, ‘The Clown’s Use of Empathy: An interview with Bob Berky’, Journal of Religion and Health, 39 (2000), 239–46 (p. 245).
Tommy Tiernan, ‘Navan Man-Bovinity Tour’, Bovinity (Galway: Mabinog), 2008), 16.40–18.28.
Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves, The Naked Jape: Uncovering The Hidden World of Jokes (London: Michael Joseph/Penguin Books), 2006), p. 258.
Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 111. Ideas of status in stand-up comedy are central to the comic-audience exchange and are operating in one way or another through all the comedy in these pages. I draw attention here particularly because of the way in which Tiernan emphasises that game of dominance and submission in this scenario.
Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers: Theatresports and the Art of Making Things Happen (London: Faber and Faber), 1999), p. 219.
Richard Kearney, On Stories: Thinking in Action, ed. by Simon Crtichley and Richard Kearney (London, Routledge, 2002), p. 4.
Smith and Watson cited in Catherine McLean-Hopkins, ‘Performing Autologues: Citing/Siting the Self in Autobiographic Performance’, in Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity ed. by Clare Wallace (Czech Republic: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), pp. 185–207 (p.194).
Kristin M. Langellier, ‘Personal Narrative, Performance and Performativity: Two or Three Things I Know For Sure’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 19:2 (1999), 125–44 (p. 129).
I borrow the term from Richard Bruner, Making Stories: Law Literature Life (London: Harvard University Press), 2003), p. 65.
Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16:1 (1986), 22–7 (p. 24).
Dee Heddon, ‘Beyond the Self: Autobiography as Dialogue’, in Monologues: Theatre, Performance Subjectivity, ed. by Clare Wallace (Czech Republic: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), pp. 157–84 (p. 162).
Tommy Tiernan, Loose (Galway: Mabinog), 2005) 09.19–13.26.
Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran, Talking to the Dead: A study of Irish Funerary Traditions (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998), p. 108.
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Colleary, S. (2015). Messages. In: Performance and Identity in Irish Stand-Up Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343901_4
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