Former Mrs Browns Boys star Rory Cowan has said Tommy Tiernan should apologise to RTE star Emer O’Neill after he left her upset when he told a controversial joke at his gig last week.
And the comic actor said he doesn’t think Tiernan’s Dublin Zoo joke was even funny. Emer has taken a stand against comedian Tiernan after she walked out of his Vicar Street gig on Friday after he told a joke about going to the African Savannah part of Dublin Zoo are being surrounded by taxi drivers.
The RTE School Hub host had enough of the joke and walked out minutes later with her friends. Comedic Dublin star Rory said he didn’t find Tommy’s joke funny – but admitted he didn’t think Tiernan intended to cause harm.
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But he said the Navan native needs to apologise and “draw a line under it”. “I didn’t think it was malevolent or mean spirited. I definitely didn’t think there was any intent behind it.”
“Prejudice is one thing, but I can’t see how Tommy Tiernan is being prejudiced – and Emer doesn’t either. She said she doesn’t think he’s a racist, she thinks he made a mistake. You have to let the mistake slide.”
But the Fair City star said he didn’t really think the joke was even funny in the first place. “What counts is how you say something and the intent behind it. But at the same time, the joke doesn’t read funny.
“I don’t think it’s funny. I really don’t. If I told a joke like that and she took offence to it, I would apologise. I can see why she is upset,” he added. "If he does apologise to her, she should be gracious enough to accept it.”
RTE has remained silent on the row, with a spokesman saying the national broadcaster - who airs his Saturday night chat show - has declined to make any comment, while Tiernan has yet to address her comments. Emer told us that her “heart sank” when Tiernan told the joke on Friday night as she was surrounded by a group of her friends, who comforted her during the gig.
“He starts the joke, and he starts talking about penguins looking like nuns with the rosary beads and I thought ‘nice one’ and I’m laughing. Then he talks about the wolves and their fierceness or their strength (reminding him of the Irish) - this is all paraphrasing because this just happened – and then he goes ‘then I went to the ‘African Savannah’ and my heart sank a little bit as soon as I heard the word ‘Africa’.
Read more: Tommy Tiernan opens up about pain of losing his mother to suicide
“I just thought ‘please don’t do this to me. I’m literally one of the only people of colour sitting here full of a room of white people’. And then came the savannah and taxi drivers. He acknowledged that the room was full of white people” and said that everyone is laughing so it mustn’t be a racist joke.
The RTE Jnr host added: “I’m not calling him racist. What was said was racist and stereotypical – that is a completely different thing.” The Bray native was left so upset, she ended up walking out of the gig with her friends a few minutes later, admitting she felt too scared to get up straight away in case she was heckled.
“I was like a statue. I was processing what was said. When he said, ‘I’m here in a room full of white people’, I wanted to say ‘well hey, I’m not white’ but nothing came out. I wanted to stand up because what he said was not right. Not everybody who is African is a taxi driver. I have a degree in education.
“I wanted to leave but I was scared because I felt that if I stand up now after him saying ‘See you are all laughing, it’s not racist’ and I stand up, I already could hear two women beside me saying ‘oh look at her, she does not seem happy with that’ so I already knew that people had spotted me in a room.
“It was probably four minutes after he said it. By the time I stood up, people probably would’ve forgotten about it. But for me, I was not able to stand up in that moment because I was afraid that he would say something or that someone in the crowd might shout something. I’ve been in situations over the course of 37 years to know that that is generally what happens to me.
“I did not feel safe to stand up and walk out at that moment. I was also embarrassed because I felt so bad for my friends that their night was ruined over the potential that we were going to have to leave.” The anti-racism activist decided to highlight the incident on her Instagram account, sharing a video of Tommy on stage before he told the joke.
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