Modified On June 23, 2006
From an interview with Tommy Tiernan that appeared on Irish Echo Online, on bringing his “often controversial brand of humor” to U.S. audiences:
“During the last tour, I performed in New York, Nebraska, Texas, Pennsylvania, Sacramento San Francisco and Washington DC,” he said.
“I don’t know if Nebraska and Pennsylvania are Republican states, but the idea that I had about them was that they were and I thought they were going to be conservative America, you know? And I actually found they were incredibly tolerant of my stuff. They struck me as people who worked hard during the week and just wanted to have a laugh. They didn’t really care what you were talking about, had no notion of political correctness or anything like that and if you said something funny, irrespective of the what it was about, they’d laugh.”
Californian audiences, he said were “a little bit prissy.”
“Yeah you know, I found them slightly more…it was kind of as if they wanted to appear to be at the vanguard of all progressive thinking,” he said.
“That was more like auditioning my material for a board of directors in some huge ideological factory.”
We have long maintained that Political Correctness is the comic’s worst enemy.
We might try to catch Tiernan next month, as he hosts the O’Comics Gala (co-hosting with Ed Byrne) in Montreal at the Festival Just For Laughs.