Locked in the arms of a cracked life

Standing in the cluttered living room of his sea-front Salthill apartment, Tommy Tiernan has the whole world at his feet. Unfortunately, he doesn’t actually know it and, en route to the espresso machine in the adjoining kitchen, the 34-year-old comedian obliviously kicks it away with one of his bright red bowling shoes. The world flies through the air, rebounds off a wobbling stack of DVDs, bounces off a chair leg, and then slowly rolls to a halt underneath the table.

The inflatable globe belongs to his 10-year-old son Dylan – currently fast asleep in his bedroom down the hall – and is just one of the many kids’ toys scattered around chez Tiernan. In fact, the only thing that there’s more of here is adult toys. No readers, I don’t mean those kinds of adult toys – though onstage in Athlone two nights ago, the Navan-born comic cheerfully admitted to having once experimentally stuck “a silver dildo” up his arse – more the material rewards of a hugely successful career spent being a funny, funny fucker.
He’s got a lot of new fangled, expensive and complicated-looking stereo, video, camera and computer equipment. There are so many CDs and DVDs messily piled around the place, it looks as though he’s just perpetrated a hugely successful smash and grab raid in Tower Records. And there are hundreds upon hundreds of books stacked on top of the kitchen cupboards. His literary taste is pretty much as you’d expect – I spot everything from Vernon God Little and The Third Policeman to biographies of Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce (later he proudly shows me a signed and impressively bound first edition Beckett – a treasured gift from his new girlfriend).
“You think this is bad?” he laughs, when I comment on the size of his library. “Take a look at this.” He leads me down the hallway and opens his bedroom door to reveal loads more boxes and bags haphazardly stuffed full of books and albums. “I can’t wait to move just so I can get all of these sorted out.”
He’s been renting this apartment ever since his much-publicised split with the mother of his three children early last year. However, his new Galway home is just about finished and, builders being truthful, he’ll be making a permanent move across town next month.
Before we start the interview proper, he connects a Mini-Disc to the stereo and plays me a recording of Sligo writer Dermot Healy drunkenly singing an auld Irish tune, explaining that he’s been interviewing various interesting characters while out on tour. “They’re kind of like radio interviews, but I’m really just doing them for my own amusement,” he explains. “Still, you never know – somebody might be interested in them at some stage.” He turns up the volume as Healy hits a wailing chorus. “Ha! He couldn’t sing to save his life but he was a gas fucker!”
As I set up my own recorder, I place my packet of cigarettes on the table. Tommy looks over sternly and wags a finger. “Sorry Olaf, this is a non-smoking apartment, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to suffer.”
“So you’re obviously not opposed to the ban, then?” I huff (but don’t puff), returning the offending item to my pocket.
“Ha! I can’t wait for the smoking ban to come in – can’t fucking wait!” he crows, cackling evilly. “I’m dying to see all ye fuckers standing out in the rain! Ha, ha!”

Eventually, after much casual gossiping, catching up and messing around, we finally get started. Although baggy-eyed and unshaven, Tiernan seems to be in pretty good form this evening, but admits that he’s beginning to feel a little road weary – a victim of popular demand. He’s been touring more or less non-stop for well over a year now, and his latest show Cracked is shortly to begin what’s threatening to be a never-ending run in Vicar St.
“It seems like I’ve been on the road since September 2002,” he sighs, stretching and yawning widely. “I did the walking tour [shown as Supertramp on N2] and then I was off for the summer, and I started then in September with a college tour – and I’ve literally been on the road ever since.”
He didn’t always tour as solidly as this but the recent changes in his personal circumstances have forced a serious change in his professional life.
“The way I used to tour was I’d do a chunk of a tour – say a six week block – and then I’d be in Galway for six weeks, but because I don’t live with the kids anymore, the way we have it now is that I look after the kids on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then I’m touring Thursday through Sunday. So the tours are now 50 weeks of the year, constant, four nights a week – as opposed to kind of intensified periods and then home and lay in the bed for a while.”
Is this new arrangement better or worse?
“I thought when I was starting out that it would be much better,” he says. “I thought it would be like having a normal job – you know, like a long distance lorry driver – or an assassin. You know, you go off and it’s a weekly gig. You head off into central Europe to shoot the painter. Ha, ha! I’m just realising now how hard it is, and how fit you have to be for it.”
He doesn’t have a strict health regime, as such, but claims that he’s been off drink and drugs for just over a year now. However, the initial feel-good factor that comes with sobriety is beginning to wane a little.
“There was an initial flush of health… and good tidings,” he grins. “I lost a lot of weight. But it’s funny, when you lose weight after giving up drink, you kind of think you’re invincible to weight gain from there on in. You kind of go, ‘I’ve given up drink, I’ve lost about a stone-and-a-half, this is fantastic – I must have some cake! Cake has no effect whatsoever! Ha, ha!’
“I’m noticing that I have to come up with something now in terms of just keeping fit, in order to have energy to go on stage at night. I used to take buckets and buckets of glucose before I went on stage, and I’ve stopped doing that now as well because it’s really bad for you and very addictive. Ha, ha! Soon to be made illegal!”
Were drink and drugs becoming a serious problem for you?
“Not really, no,” he muses. “It was more the… Em, or was it becoming a problem? I started not to enjoy it. What I used to find was that when you start doing those things, the night becomes full of possibility. And the night is just inflamed with that feeling of anything might happen. And when you get tired of them, the night becomes full of probability. And I just got tired of the probabilities.”
Or the inevitabilities…
“Ha! Exactly! That’s what it is. When I’m out as well now, I reach one o’clock and everybody around me is starting to get slightly high and wild. And you’ve a decision to make. Do I turn in now or do I go for it? In terms of do I make an extra effort to be social? And I find the nights that I make an extra effort to be social are really brilliant. You know, I end up dancing and stuff like that. Right now, it’s working for me.”
Do you not find intoxicated people really annoying when you’re sober? I know I certainly did when I stopped drinking…
“You stopped drinking!” he guffaws in disbelief. “When was that? Lent – 1981! Ha, ha! No, I think what ends up happening is you end up scanning wherever you are for other sober people and, more often than not, they’re the staff! But no, I’m enjoying it now, because it’s good craic. And I sometimes think that my friends who do get high and wild – when they come back and tell me what they got up to, I kind of live through their experiences.
“I want them to do really stupid things so they can tell me the next day, so I can laugh with them at what they’ve done. And I get as much craic out of that as I did out of doing it myself.”
Stand-up comedy generally is a profession that really lends itself to people getting out of their heads, though, isn’t it?
“Is it? I don’t believe that. But I think there probably is a culture of it. We’re all single men. I don’t mean we’re without partners, but when we were together we were single men. And put a bunch of men together and… By single men, I mean we work on our own. But I don’t think it lends itself to alcoholism any more than… bookkeeping.”
What about those startling moments of clarity you get through drunkenness? Or just general wasted-ness?
“Well, you still get the ideas when you’re sober,” he insists. “You play with your head whatever state it’s in. So if your head is awash with porter, you play with that. But I don’t feel that the material I’m coming up with now is any less – or more – spectacular than the stuff I was coming up with when I was drunk.”
Did you ever go onstage really out of your head?
“Yeah, I’ve gone on a few times high and wild,” he laughs. “I remember taking coke going on stage. And taking E going on stage even. The E was a disaster, actually. I did a play one time – an afternoon performance – and I took an E about an hour before the show started. And it was just ridiculous! Because I lost all notion of where I was and who I was supposed to be, and it was just a real mess. For me, of course, it wasn’t. It was an opportunity to tell the people that I worked with how I really felt about them and how important they were to me! It makes happiness seem like a form of autism. Ha, ha!
“But one of the reasons I stopped doing chemicals was because of the mood swing thing of getting wasted on a Saturday night and then being really destroyed on a Tuesday,” he continues. “Tuesday afternoons usually used to be really bad. You find when you give up the stuff, those afternoons are still there. It’s just you can blame your downs on real things. You blame them on chemicals when you have them when you’re on chemicals, but then when you get them when you’re not on chemicals, you’re thinking, ‘well, it’s just the same old circus’. That’s what it was.
“Other than that, you do reclaim the morning. There’s more fresh air going through your head. Going through my head anyway, there’s more fresh air in it. It still rains occasionally, but that’s the way it is.”
Ah, the tears of a clown. Like many successful comedians, Tiernan has his occasional bouts with serious melancholy. He’s never been tempted to try antidepressants like Prozac, though he did recently bring some St. John’s Wort back home from the States (“I haven’t even opened it yet though”). However, he’s not really looking to cure his depression, reckoning that without the personal lows, there wouldn’t be any career highs.
“I was watching a documentary recently about Tom Murphy and he said that if someone came along in the morning with an envelope, and told him that if you opened the envelope the key to your woe is in here and it’ll be unlocked and you’ll be fine, he said that he wouldn’t open it. And I’d be the same.
“But I think men are more inclined to settle for that kind of selfishness. I think women see through us. I think we’re slightly… em, we like indulging ourselves in our own unhappiness. I love doing it. Ha, ha! And I think women see through it. So it’s best just not to have them around.”

Truth be told, Tommy’s had fairly mixed luck with women over the last 12 months or so – and not just in his personal life. When he found himself sharing the stage with a particularly bubbly and excitable Jordan on The Dunphy Show last year, he wound up walking off.
“One of the main reasons I walked off was because my girlfriend, Yvonne, was in the wings and I wanted to… Em, I knew that she would probably have been put out by what Jordan was doing. Because the woman was about to sit on me! So my main thing was I wanted to get out of Jordan’s orbit and go give Yvonne a hug and a kiss. More for my own reassurance.
“We were talking about her yesterday actually. Yvonne was saying that she saw a documentary about her, where she was at home in this fantastic big house and it showed her getting up on one of her very expensive horses and galloping across the fields so she’s, em… She fell off! Ha, ha! So whatever is going on there is her thing but… (shrugs).”
Did you watch her on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here?
“I watched one episode of that and I thought she was brilliant in it. She seemed to be very solid but now she seems to be back in the dizzy world of tabloids. But Jordan is of no real interest to me, to be honest.”
Not that Mr. Tommy Tiernan is a complete stranger to the dizzy world of tabloids himself. Last March, he left his long-term partner and the mother of his three children, and began appearing in public with his business partner Yvonne McMahon – a former member of Abba-esque. However, it wasn’t until just a few months ago that the tabloids finally decided to make a big deal of it, and the Irish Sunday Mirror ran a nasty front page story under the headline ‘TOMMY ROTTEN!’
“I don’t really want to talk about the break-up here, Olaf,” he says. “I don’t want to bring anybody else’s dirty laundry into it. I don’t mind washing me own – but our bloomers are connected!”
Still, he doesn’t have particularly fond memories of his tabloid experience:
“It was at a time of high stress. I’d been done before by the Sunday World. But it was a real eye-opener in terms of what people are prepared to do and how some journalists are really, really ugly creatures, and how they become enslaved to whatever euphoria they get when the paper is published. It’s a righteousness and I think they’ve lost a bit of heart and a bit of soul. When you see headlines that really do intrude on people’s personal lives…
“When you become a victim of it – and ‘victim’ is the wrong word – but you realise that it’s a human being that phones you up and says [adopts sycophantic tone], ‘Hi Tommy, how are ye? I was just wondering…’ And just the bald audacity of them is quite chilling. They’re fuckers! You know, they’re fuckers! It’s hard to know. There must be a line of logic there for them that they can somehow justify themselves.”
Did you know it was going to happen in advance?
“I knew it was going to happen before the Sunday, yeah,” he nods. “I went to bed on Saturday night knowing that there was going to be something in the papers on Sunday morning. And I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t slightly thrilling. There was an element of that definitely – of kind of, oh, cool! – and then you saw it. It was just an eye-opener. Because when somebody phones you up, you think they’re working on the same wavelength as you are. You think they’re ordinary decent people.”
Not that he’s exactly scarred for life by the experience…
“Again, you can’t take them too seriously. I have the thing laminated and stuck up on the wall. It’s a form of victory over the fuckers!”
As it happens, it’s not just the tabloids who’ve had a go at him. When Tiernan first rocketed to fame after his hilarious Late Late Show debut in 1997, the Irish Times stitched him up as well.
“It was after the blasphemy thing on The Late Late Show.” he recalls. “And this guy phoned me up and he’d gone through my agent and he said, ‘No, it’s nothing to do with the blasphemy thing, we just want to do a profile piece about Tommy’. And he interviewed me for close-on 90 minutes, and towards the very end he said to me, ‘Look, can we just talk about the blasphemy thing for a second, just to put it in context with what you’ve done?’ And at that stage I had been seduced into a relationship with him, and I said yeah.
“And I think it’s one of the traps that’s very easy to fall into when you’re starting to develop a public profile – to use a journalist as a confessor. Or to confess to the journalist as if the journalist is a priest. But the Irish Times thing, when it appeared, was just about the blasphemy thing.”
Speaking of the Irish Times, your name recently appeared there in a quarter page petition published by Stadas –a group calling for recognition of Irish as an official working language of the EU. I wasn’t surprised to see fellow Navan-man Hector O hEochagain’s name there, but I wouldn’t particularly have seen you as the Gaelgoir type…
“Well, if I’d known it was gonna appear in the Irish Times I wouldn’t have signed it,” he grins. “Ha, ha! Em, I didn’t see the harm in it. I was talking to somebody recently and he said, ‘There are things that Irish people can’t say in English’. And then somebody else said that they remember listening to an old woman talking and she said that, to her, the English language sounded like two people fighting in the kitchen. But the petition was simply to have Irish recognised as an official language in the EU, and I can’t see why it shouldn’t be.”
Well, wouldn’t it mean that millions of pages of official documents then have to be translated into Irish?
“Oh really!” he says, in mock surprise. “Oh Jesus, I’m dead set against that! Ha, ha! I certainly wasn’t informed of that before I lent my weight to the campaign. Ha, ha!”
He doesn’t get involved in campaigning issues generally (“I never really get asked”), but does as much charity work as he can reasonably fit into his schedule.
“Yeah, I try and do as much as I can – Cancer Care West and the lifeboats and stuff like that. You try and let there be a little bit of karma to your work and to what you’re doing. So it’s not entirely selfish. Be generous with your time, you know.”
When it comes to his children, though (Dylan has two younger siblings, aged 2 and 4), he says he can be quite ruthless time-wise. At his request, this interview is taking place late at night, so he could have the day free for the kids. Despite the break-up with their mother, he always puts his family first and is highly conscious that his comedy career can’t take precedence over his parental responsibilities.
“Well what happens is, if you’re not careful – and it’s your decision – you end up volunteering for stuff because you think it’s a good idea and you think it might do you favours, and you end up then all of a sudden where your children are at the dangerous age of 13 or 14 and they say, ‘I’m sorry, but I want fuck-all to do with you – and I might give you a shout for a pint or a game of pool when I’m 32’. So you’ve just got to manage your time. And even though the gigging four nights a week at the moment is hard, it gives everybody a bit of structure.”

Tiernan’s latest show is called Cracked and, having watched him slay the audience in Athlone’s Deancrowe Theatre two nights earlier, this writer can testify that the former Perrier Award winner has never been funnier. Drawing on his thespian and rather dubious dancing skills as well as his comedic talent, the humour is at times as much visual as it is hilariously observational.
“It kind of evolved from the last show,” he explains. “The show originally was called Tell Me A Story and now around 90% of it has changed and it’s kind of morphed into Cracked.”
As per usual, Cracked sees Tiernan taking serious potshots at religion generally, and Catholicism in particular. However, the comedian is making no apologies for it.
“It’s just what I’m drawn to talk about,” he says. “I love it and I find myself drifting back to it an awful lot. But the main thing is to be able to be funny about all these things. Like, Bill Hick’s main thing was political – politics, sex and drug hypocrisy. That was his arena. And mine would probably be religion, my schooldays, sex.
“So I am drawn to religion definitely. And hopefully talking about it in a way that… irrespective of what’s happened to the church in Ireland, we all still have spirits. Just because the Catholic church seems to be disappearing doesn’t mean that our divine aspirations or the island or the people are. And it’ll be interesting to see where we go next. Whether we turn into money-loving Euro-crats or whether we’ll… em, just what’ll happen to us, to that Irish spirit?
“We’ve a great capacity for devoutness,” he continues. “And we’ve a great capacity for a kind of ascetic in religion and it’ll be interesting to see what we do with it. And I think that’s probably why during the Celtic Tiger, our intake of drugs and drink rocketed. It was probably because we found ourselves with all this money and nothing to believe in. And who better to get hammered than us?
“I can’t remember if I did it in the Athlone show the other night or not, but I have a routine about the fact that as an island we’re kind of divided between the people in the monastery and the lunatics out in the fields. That’s part of the Irish duality, I think. The side of us that became devoutly Catholic and became known around the world as a religious country. And that side of us is married to the side of us, at the same time, known around the world as a bunch of dangerous, lunatic, alcoholic ravers! So it’ll be interesting to see where it develops from now. What’ll be born in its place. Those kind of things interest me.”
At one point during the Athlone show, he began doing a sketch about the Galway winos that was as darkly surreal as it was brilliant. Talking streams of consciousness gibberish for about four minutes, as the lighting gradually dimmed, it was almost like watching a particularly bleak Beckett monologue.
“It’s the one section of the show that has an opportunity for real beauty,” he says. “And I like that. Mind you, that was the last time I did it. I didn’t do it in the late show and I didn’t do it in Wexford the following night. It somehow jars with the rest of the show. But there’s no harm in something coming out of the left field occasionally.
“I remember reading a Bob Dylan line. He’s got this great song called ‘Blind Willy McTell’. Before it was released on this Colombia bootleg series, people were always saying to him that it was one of his greatest ever songs, but he never released it. He said that he didn’t like it. He never felt as if he nailed it properly. And I guess people can feel that way about bits of their work, irrespective of how people respond to it. You never feel as if you got it right. But sometimes it’s good to include something like that in a show, so that there’s something in the show that is… beyond you.”
At one point in Cracked, Tiernan repeats the expression ‘Fuck off!’ about 120 times straight – eventually doing a Nazi goose-step to the rhythm of the words – before pointing out that ‘Fuck off!’ pretty much encapsulates everything the Israelis are currently saying to the Palestinians on a daily basis. Will he still do the anti-Israel sketch in Colorado next week?
“I hope so,” he mulls, scrunching his face and scratching his greying curls. It looks as though the thought hasn’t occurred to him. Eventually his face brightens, “Yeah, I think I probably will.”
I thought that the line where you talked about the Israelis telling the Palestinians to, ‘Fuck off to someplace where you’re not from’ was truly excellent.
“Thank you,” he nods, gratefully. “The actual line is, ‘Why don’t you fuck off to some place where you don’t come from?’ But, yeah, I’ll do it in front of them and see how it goes. It’s mainly Jewish Hollywood types who’re going to be there. It’s a television festival, organised by the TV people in Hollywood.”
Does it worry you that those Jewish Hollywood types might go, ‘Well, we’re not going with this guy’ if you’re so obviously anti-Israel?
“Nah, sure I’ve… nothing,” he says, shrugging. “I’m not looking for anything at all. I’ve no desire to spend months and months and months in the States. I did do a pilot for a sitcom in LA a couple of years ago that didn’t get taken up – which didn’t particularly bother me. But the way my situation is now, I’ve absolutely no interest in it.”
Have you done much work in America?
“I’ve done New York a few times, yeah, and that’s been fine. But it’s all time – and how do you spend your days? What do you want to invest yourself in? If I wasn’t living here, if I wasn’t renting an apartment, and I was living in a mansion out the country and I had 15 cars and eight maids, pool tables and swimming pools and art from all over the world. And my picture on the front of every magazine from Veritas to Time…
“What’s to be gained out of that really? It’s still just you in a room with other people. And I’m really happy with the way things are right now. And the level of things I’ve been able to achieve in this country is fantastic. And I think anything more would be doing the dog on it. I just don’t see the profit in it.”
Not that he hasn’t tried spreading his comedic wings in the past. In 1998/99 Tiernan starred in a serviceable and reasonably well received Channel 4 sitcom called Small Potatoes. “That was just fantastic, amazing, brilliant… really mediocre television,” he says now.
Did you enjoy the experience though?
“I don’t know if I did or not. The crime would be to take it too seriously. But it really was ordinary television. That’s how I look on it now. And I’m almost at the stage now where I can laugh about it.”
It wasn’t particularly critically slammed or anything though, was it?
“No, but it just never flew. It never flew. It was good bubblegum, but it wasn’t particularly flavourful. It was grand bubblegum.”
Is TV sitcom something you’d like to try again?
“No… well, possibly,” he avers. “It’s hard enough to just do what I’m doing right now. I’m not one of these people who has buckets of energy. All my energy is spent just doing what I do. Shit always attracts flies, so I think stand-ups always attract… shit. Ha, ha!”
You made a movie with Dennis Leary about five years ago, didn’t you?
“Ah yeah, but the fact that you even know that would be due to an agent hyping up what I’ve done. I was in one scene. And it just happened that Dennis Leary was in the scene. But to say that I made a movie with him is like somebody going to see Man United and saying that they played with them. I was an ant on it. And I don’t have huge interest in doing movies really.”
So what are your comedic ambitions then?
“The ambitions are with the work,” he states. “Just the work. How do I make it funnier? Or darker? How hard can I make people laugh.”
No stopping until you’ve given someone in your audience a heart attack!!
“That’s it – until I’ve killed!” he chuckles. “No, I think for the work to have more resonance and for it to be more joyous, and funnier, and more delightful, and more surprising, and more hilarious, and more… anarchic. And I think if you stay working in Ireland the whole time, you can become a bit of a gombeen playing to the lowest common denominator. You can be turned into someone who, instead of surprising the audience, just kind of reaffirms their prejudices.
“And you get people like say Tom Murphy and Brian Friel, who write about Irish people in Irish situations, but that doesn’t dilute their work. And I’d like to be able to talk about Irish things for the rest of my life without it becoming gombeen comedy. The way you read Flann O’Brien. People all over the world love Flann O’Brien but he talks about the devil going out with one of the Corrigans from Carlow. You know, that kind of thing.
“He’d be my comic hero really, Flann O’Brien. Because really that’s what the work is. And I think the danger would be to kind of go, ‘I’m gigging in Wexford tonight – or Carlow – and, sure, they wouldn’t expect much there. Whey-ho! I’ll do the Navan accent and they’ll all be laughing, they’ll all be happy’. So the challenge is to try and dig deeper and deeper and deeper into the work and make it hilarious. In the way that Flann O’Brien did it, he was just brilliant.

With the interview drawing to a close, he asks me to turn the tape off for a moment and goes to make some fresh espressos. As he tinkers with the machine, he chats idly about how he’s really looking forward to coming off tour next May. It’ll be the first proper break he’s had in a while. He’s planning to spend his summer “off collecting stuff – like a magpie”, before launching a brand new show in September.
When I ask him if he still has that novel in the attic? he looks up towards the ceiling, grins and says, “I don’t have an attic here!” However, he is currently writing a play that will be directed by Kristen Sheridan and premiered at this year’s Galway Arts Festival (“It’s about an abusive woman who is put together with an academic man, 15 years younger than her. And how they cope with each other, how they learn”).
As we casually chit-chat, I suddenly remember that hotpress photographer Mick Quinn had told me that Tiernan has a quote from Joyce tattooed on his right shoulder. I ask to see and he immediately pulls his woollen sweater down to reveal it. Inscribed in almost heavy-metal-ish gothic lettering, it’s a fairly unremarkable line from Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man that takes up about four inches of skin and reads: “She was walking on before him, her hands holding her skirts up from the slush.”
That’s a funny choice for a tattoo…
“Do you know where it used to be?” he says, pulling his sweater back up. “There was a James Joyce centre on the quays and it had a bit of scaffolding outside it. And this line was written on the scaffolding. And every time I drove out of Dublin I saw it. And I loved slowing down to read it because it struck me as a beautiful sentence. And I wanted to get a tattoo. And I was born on Bloomsday [June 16], so I went into the tattoo parlour. And the guy was more used to doing spiders and stuff, and I gave him the quote and said, ‘Write that on me’. Ha, ha! It’s not the kind of tattoo that would instil fear in your opponent over a game of pool down in Sally Longs!”
What do you make of all the Joyce revisionism currently going on? Roddy Doyle describing Ulysses as unreadable and in need of a good editor…
“I really don’t know much about anything when it comes to that sort of stuff,” he shrugs. “I liked the sentence and I liked the film Nora. And I started Ulysses a few times. The fact that I was born on Bloomsday as well I suppose adds to it – though perhaps more importantly, it’s also Stan Laurel’s birthday. Who isn’t mentioned that often in Ulysses – though he perhaps ought to be. Ha, ha!”
It turns out that he has another tattoo as well.
“A few years ago, I wanted to tattoo a word onto my body that summed me up best, so I had this done,” he explains, pulling his sweater up to reveal a small four-letter word written in blue lettering beneath his left nipple.
And why did Tommy Tiernan feel that ‘GEEK’ was appropriate?
Ireland’s undisputed king of comedy looks at me blankly for a moment. Then he bursts into uproarious laughter. “Actually, Olaf,” he chuckles. “It says ‘SEEK’!” b