If laughter is the best medicine, then the performers at Town Hall last Thursday were dispensing Class A pharmaceuticals to a full house of Irish comedy fans. The venue, founded as a sanctuary for the free expression of radical thought almost ninety years ago, made a fitting home for the night for three outspoken Irish comedians, Tommy Tiernan, Ardal O’Hanlon, and Dylan Moran.
Billed as “The Fellas,” the trio is the cream of a generation of Irish comics who took London and Edinburgh by storm in the 1990s. Better known over here from UK sitcom imports and internet video clips, Tiernan, O’Hanlon and Moran brought the house down in the home stretch of an East Coast tour that significantly raises their U.S. profile.
Despite expectations of topical material, The Fellas gave swine flu, Iranian elections and Detroit bankruptcy a wide berth but nonetheless got plenty of mileage out of the old reliables: religion, marriage, and death.
All three are family men, and Tommy Tiernan, a father of five, claims he finds it easier to have children than not have them. The irony would not be wasted on him, then, that family planning pioneer Margaret Sanger was arrested and hauled bodily from the same stage by the police in 1921 for having the audacity to address a mixed-gender audience on the thorny subject of contraception. Tiernan, a big music fan, noted that Bob Dylan had also performed there, sounding like a 90-year-old man while still in his twenties. Now that he’s much closer to ninety, the aging folkie’s voice reminds Tiernan of a spirit medium working an ouija board.
Tiernan’s trip to America inevitably inspires him to have a go at creationists, and he tackled the flaws in intelligent design theory by critiquing some of earth’s badly engineered species — Tyrannosaurus Rex, in prehistoric times, was constantly angry because its arms were too short to do anything but play the accordion. Chickens, and their pathetic attempts to fly, came in for some stick as well, in a flurry of over-the-top Tiernan poultry impressions.
Dylan Moran took a more cerebral view of faith, defining religion as a formalized panic about death (and death is an endpoint towards which men are accelerated by women who make them do gardening — but that’s another surreal Dylan tangent). Whether people like it or not, picking on Christians is fair game in standup, but comedians are a fatwah-phobic bunch, and Islam is usually a hands-off subject. Not so for Moran. He muses upon the different expectations of male and female suicide bombers: that the men expect to be greeted in heaven by seventy-two virgins, while the women will settle for longer maternity leave and more help with childcare during the week.
Moran has children of his own, and rails at childless couples who ask him innocently what he did at the weekend, as if a dad’s Saturday would be different from any other day of the week. The usual spills, stains and tears must be wiped up, while his single friends are off hot air ballooning and going to night clubs that are so cool they are underground and on top of a building at the same time. Sipping cabernet sauvignon, and dunking chocolate in it to compensate for the fact that New York laws forbid him from smoking onstage, the sardonic comic winged some zingers at world leaders, claiming that Silvio Berlusconi is so crooked that he has to sleep on a spiral staircase.
Ardal O’Hanlon, who opened the show, operates closer to home and based much of his act on the downturn in the Irish economy, which forced him to downsize his gag-writing team and outsource the work to India. But nonetheless he welcomes recent changes in Ireland, and in particular the influx of Polish people, as it finally gave him the chance to fill up the X, Y, and Z sections of his address book. Not everyone feels as happy about the new immigrants — O’Hanlon described an argument he had with a taxi driver who blamed Dublin’s traffic congestion on foreigners, despite the fact that they had just arrived and couldn’t afford cars yet. The taxi driver pointed out that they caused the problem because Irish motorists were slowing down to have a look at them.
Thanks to the shared wisdom of O’Hanlon, Moran and Tiernan, we now know that Irish people are composed of ninety per cent rain and ten per cent resentment, men would eat chicken out of a hat at dinner time rather than discuss home d