Serial Offenders

Brendon Burns:

Mark Nelson:

Tommy Tiernan:

When Brendon Burns won the 2007 if.comedy award for So I Suppose THIS is Offensive Now he hired comedian Sajeela Kershi to pose as a racially abused heckler specifically to make the audience question their own morality. It was a radical, innovative and thoroughly offensive show.

But the most genre-bending element of his current show is having Dave Eastgate, a guitarist, strumming seemingly at random throughout the set. In Eastgate’s favour, some of his sporadic exchanges with Burns are genuinely hilarious. Yet you’d have thought there would be a better way of integrating this without distracting us with a constant stream of guitar.

Gasps frequently precede the laughter for Burns’s more prurient material but, although he doesn’t shy away from causing offence, for the most part this is an optimistic show. He talks, possibly too candidly for some, about his experience of life, his beliefs and what he thinks is wrong with the world.

Still, Burns is much funnier when he is haranguing the crowd rather than preaching to them. For all the haranguing, the show doesn’t hold together as well as it could. 

Mark Nelson is a more understated comedian. He explains early on that his title Offending The Senses was only supposed to pull in the crowds and not flag up a particularly depraved night of observation.

This is misleading. Yet thanks to his stealth delivery, you actually find yourself laughing before you’ve taken in quite how outrageous what he’s saying is. Still, none of this seems mean-spirited. Stephen Gately and Raoul Moat feature in his routines, though he manages to keep this controversial without seeming distasteful.

Nelson’s most endearing moments are when he speaks of his own experiences, such as finding notes in his own handwriting from "drunk Mark" to "sober Mark" or being morally offended by daytime dating programs.

Often in-your-face comics will do their best to poke fun at the audience. Yet when Nelson speaks to individuals in the crowd he seems irreverent but ultimately on their side. Even when an audience member inadvertently ruins one of his final routines, instead of trying to force it he scraps the prepared gag and fills the time with friendly banter. Rarely has someone managed to be so simultaneously offensive and likable.

For previous form in courting controversy, Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan is way ahead of the others. As well as hampering his Irish television career by performing routines about the Catholic Church, he has more recently made further enemies abroad with a mock outburst concerning the Holocaust.

In fairness, this was given only as an example of the extremes comedians will reach in the search for laughs, explaining that comedy is “about allowing whatever lunacy is inside you to come out in a special protected environment where people know that nothing they say is being taken seriously.” In this show, Tiernan emphasises that what he says should be taken purely as comedy. Thankfully, there isn’t any other way to take it.

He weaves beautiful narratives, whether they’re about inadvertently encouraging his daughter to sing lewd songs at a football match or Jesus’ penchant for popping to the bar midway through the temptations.

Tiernan's physicality is certainly pronounced and he is essentially a showman in the variety style – but of this he is a master. He leaves plenty of scope for those who want to take offence, but you’d be better off enjoying his fantastic comic performance for what it is.