Bill Burr Learns the Origins of Irish Comedy

The Irish people became natural comedians because “we had no choice,” Irish comic Tommy Tiernan told Bill Burr on his Monday Morning podcast. “That’s why we are like that. It’s not like we had to choose between being masters of the world and singers — we had no choice, we had no money.”

“We’re good at talking,” Tiernan said. “We love music and drinking and singing and crying and fighting amongst each other."

In other words, the Irish basically “get life,” Burr said. “You get what life is about.”

Much of the Irish sense of humor was based on being poor, Tiernan explained. “When you have no money, when you got nothing, what do you do?”

Over here, joked Burr, you get a gun and start robbing people. 

That wasn’t how it worked in the old days, Tiernan says. Instead, the Irish would concoct a drink made of “rain and tears and old potatoes.” Then, there was nothing left to do except “let’s fuckin’ drink it and see what happens,” he laughed. “And then somebody would make a fiddle out of an old cat and they’d start (making music), and that was our culture for 800 years.” 

“We were so downtrodden, our only refuge was the spoken word and music and drink,” Tiernan continued. “And to this day, Irish people aren’t great at architecture or any of the obvious hallmarks of empire.”

As for Irish comedy these days? Tiernan said its quality is related to sex. “I remember once I just met this girl. We just started having loads of sex. As an old man said to me, there was spunk flying all over the place.” And the result? “My stand-up was brilliant.” 

It’s a creative tradition that Tiernan traces back to at least William Butler Yeats, an Irish poet born in 1865. “When he hit his 60s, he was one of the first guys that got this … operation which was highly unusual in the 1930s where he could get an erection,” the comic explained. “He was so tied into the horn and the poem, that there had been a connection between the erection and the finished product, that he went as far as to have an operation.”

Tiernan doubled-down on his orgasms-lead-to-creativity theory. Perhaps an active sex life opens some kind of chakra that inspires playfulness, he theorized. “I don’t know if it’s the same for mechanics and stuff like that but in the creative arts, I think there’s a connection between the constant flow of semen and producing good work,” the comic concluded. “I’m just throwing that out there.”