No laughing matter as Tiernan grabs comedy world record after 36 hours

AFTER 36 hours and 15 minutes of self-proclaimed “gigglement”, Tommy Tiernan called it a night.

It was just after 3am on Easter Sunday when the dishevelled, somewhat delirious Tiernan, his voice hoarse from telling non-stop gags and the muscles in his tongue “beginning to swell”, broke the world record for the longest solo stand-up comedy show. Sharon Shannon launched into a celebratory tune and the audience whooped as Tiernan was presented with the honour in Nun’s Island Theatre in Galway.

“Towards the end I didn’t think I was going to make it,” Tiernan said, “but there was such good support from the audience.”

Touching on plenty of controversial topics, Tiernan joked about failed suicide attempts, the Holocaust and getting caught parking his car in disabled-only spaces. He still intends for the profits of the event to go to the Galway Youth Diocesan Services for homeless teenagers, even though the board has refused to accept them.

“After about 30 hours I was finding it pretty hard to string a sentence together,” Tiernan said. With only five-minute breaks each hour, and a ban on any material being repeated within four-hour periods, Tiernan stayed on his feet for most of the 36 hours. “Nobody was brave enough – or crazy enough – to attempt this before,” said Katie Forde, adjudicator for the Guinness World Records. “Even though he was visibly tired, he still really put on a show.”

It began on Good Friday at 3pm, with the stage decorated with pagan symbols and a St Brigid’s Cross. By Saturday afternoon, as Tiernan was musing about born-again Christians and wondering whether “a dog could have a stutter”, he was presented with a glass of bubbly as he broke the record for solo stand-up comedy after being on stage for 24 hours.

As the hours ticked by and the crowds came and went, Tiernan knocked back double espressos and Red Bulls, and nibbled bits of chocolate. At one point he tucked into a pastry, but even that turned into a joke as he held it above the microphone: “He broke the bread and said: this is a croissant.”

Tiernan spoke about growing up in Navan in the 1980s, wearing his mother’s velvet trousers, applying too much talcum powder to the groin area, and how as a teenager he was forced to cycle his mother’s “Raleigh shopper” with a basket on the front.

He described how his father reacted the first time he cursed on The Late Late Show(Tiernan's girlfriend took the angry phone call and said he was in the shower; "Well tell him to wash his f***ing mouth out," his father replied).

In some of his more risqué material, Tiernan said he was curious about failed suicide attempts: “I committed suicide myself,” he told the audience, “we’re all dead; this is limbo.”

He joked about Israel, which acted "like they had applied for planning permission in the Old Testamentand it had just come through now". As he neared Saturday night, the jokes took a turn for the more explicit, Tiernan describing his first sexual experiences and wondering whether it's "OK to give your own girlfriend [the drug] rohypnol".

But with almost every show sold out, the crowds were impressed. “He was better than normal, I thought,” said punter Tom Hackett.

“I’m a bit busted after it all,” Tiernan said yesterday afternoon, his voice barely audible. He’s already planning for next Easter. “I think it would be a fantastic gesture to have a public reading of the Koran, from beginning to end . . . it would be marvellously confusing.”