Anatomy of a condensed comedy routine: Sean O'Driscoll tails Tommy Tiernan before his slot on Letterman in New York this week
Tommy Tiernan is looking at himself in the mirror of a tiny dressing room at the Ed Sullivan theatre in mid-Manhattan. He glances at his jacket. First left, then right.
"I don't know," he says nervously. "It's a bit fucky looking, isn't it?" His Dublin-born girlfriend and adviser, Yvonne, looks it over. "It's fine, it's smart, you're grand." Tiernan is hopping from one foot to another. "I don't know," he says eventually. "I'm excited and tired at the same time, I don't know." In 37 minutes' time, Tiernan will appear before his largest US audience yet, as a guest on The Late Show with David Letterman, watched by more than four million people.
As a Letterman researcher reminds us, this is the comedy Superbowl and it requires some serious practice. During the entire weekend before taping the show last Monday, Tiernan and Eddie Brill, a comedy booker for Letterman, have gone back and forth to New York comedy clubs so that Tiernan can edit his material to the precise 4 minutes, 30 seconds allowed on the show. In all, Tiernan has played eight shows at three New York comedy clubs over the weekend just so Eddie, a huge, affable character and a seasoned comedy pro, could analyse his performances. At Gotham, the first club, Eddie can already see complications. Tommy's routine about accidentally greeting Prince Charles with a Nazi salute is chief among them. Eddie calls a Letterman producer to check it out. By the time the producer calls back, he and Tommy have agreed to drop the story.
Even with that edit, Tommy's routine is still three minutes too long. "Eddie is genuinely fantastic help but it's all about pleasing Dave," he says nervously. "It's all about what Dave finds funny and 'Dave really likes that' or 'Can you dress up a bit, Dave doesn't like it too casual'."
There is another problem: Tommy planned to end the set imagining that disgraced Irish Olympic showjumping horse, Waterford Crystal, deliberately took drugs so he could be put out to stud and have his pick of the fillies with his Olympic medal draped around his neck. The last line, and the cue for the Letterman band to kick in, comes when Waterford Crystal sees a filly being brought to his stud and casually commands a stable boy: "Back her up to me, PJ!" Eddie doesn't think that's a good idea. They search for an ending that isn't so sexual but are worried it will ruin the rhythm of the skit.
After two shows on Friday and three on Saturday, they still have three more shows on Sunday to work out the kinks, the most serious of which is confusion over a crucial line about pharmaceutical companies replacing nations as the official teams of an imagined Irish Olympics. At the Gotham club on Sunday, Tiernan tells the audience that he imagines the headline, "Viagra team embarrassed by baton race mix-up". Nobody laughs. He and Eddie talk it through later. It's the word "baton", Eddie explains. In the US, it's pronounced as two syllables - Bat-on, so the audience is confused. "It gets to the stage where you're almost timing your inhaling, it's that precise," says Tiernan.
On Sunday, the word is dropped completely, replaced with "relay race mix-up." It gets a tiny laugh at the second last club. Tiernan, exhausted, wonders if he should drop the Viagra joke completely but needs something to set up the next line about the Prozac team still feeling happy after losing an Olympic game.
"It's a fascinating experience," says Tiernan in the limo on the way to the show the next day. "You see how surgical and clinical it is, every word has to be accounted for." As we climb out of the limo, the paparazzi and fans outside the studio push forward. The cameras begin to click furiously for about two seconds. Then they realise that nobody famous has emerged. The fans look at Tiernan, then me, then Yvonne, then the publicist, Kristin. One of them shoves an autograph book towards Yvonne. "Am . . . Could you sign this please?" Tiernan starts laughing and points the paparazzi towards her.
INSIDE THE DOOR, we are rejoined by Eddie. "I'm very nervous," says Tommy. "You'd be out of your mind not to be," says Eddie. "Just be yourself, keep the audience engaged." Eddie stands in the middle of the stage and looks over to Letterman's empty desk. "If you want, you can give Letterman a nod. It's nice, he likes that," he says, as Tiernan checks out the blue floor spot where comedians must stop when they walk on stage.
Eddie tells him that Letterman will come over to meet him after the skit has finished. "And what's he going to say?" asks Tiernan. Eddie's natural smile widens to a half moon. "He's going to say, 'Get the f**k out of my show'."
Back upstairs, the seminal and decidedly middle-aged US rock group Sonic Youth have arrived into the dressing-rooms next door and are watching The Simpsons. A technician tells them they can watch the show live on channel 43. "Change The Simpsons for Letterman?" says the guitarist. "I don't think so." "Seasoned pros," says Tiernan, bouncing up and down on the spot.
An eerie Iarnród Éireann-sounding voice comes over the intercom: "Three minutes till show begins. Three minutes." Tommy is taken downstairs to the green room as Letterman bounces on stage to the clashing sound of the Late Show band.
Robert Duvall is the first guest and he is plugging his new movie with talk of his time on The Godfather, telling a giggling Letterman that he never got to know co-star Marlon Brando because Brando was too busy eating.
The interview ends in minutes and will you please welcome Tommy Tiernan . . . Tiernan has chosen Bob Dylan's Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum as his introduction music. The Late Show band are blaring it out, nodding awkwardly at Letterman.
His routine starts quickly with a bit about Americans taking fire alarms too seriously and how Dublin bar customers would never leave the pub if a fire alarm went off, "even the place was made of Christmas trees and gasoline".
It gets a good laugh. He runs straight into the Olympics piece. Yvonne is offstage listening on headphones. She tenses up. After all the discussions about dropping the word baton, Tommy says: "Viagra embarrassed at relay baton mix-up" but the audience gets it and laughs uproariously.
For the first time with this joke, he holds his hand out theatrically and starts rubbing something imaginary off it, as if he was a runner who just handled someone's Viagra-aided manhood instead of a relay baton. He fluffs the Prozac joke but the audience doesn't notice and Letterman is chuckling off-screen.
The skit ends, as finally agreed, with "back her up PJ!" and the band come racing in with another upbeat tune. Letterman is over shaking Tiernan's hand. "Tommy Tiernan, good job," he shouts over the band. "We'll be right back, everybody, with Sonic Youth." Tiernan is looking around him as Letterman talks. They go to commercials and Letterman thanks him again briefly before taking his place back at his desk. The technicians rush in to set up Sonic Youth.
Tiernan walks off stage to congratulatory hugs from Yvonne and Eddie.
"Oh Jesus," he says softly as he goes back upstairs to his tiny dressingroom. "Oh, Jesus Christ. That was something else completely."
Tommy Tiernan is on The Late Show with David Letterman, ITV4, Monday, 11pm