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Bill Burr says he doesn’t like “naming names and shit,” but when he talks about the handsome young comic with the abs, it’s pretty clear he’s talking about Matt Rife.

“There’s a comic over here,” he told comedian Tommy Tiernan on his Monday Morning Podcast. “He’s young, he’s good-looking, he’s crushing it.”

“Yeah, muscles,” replied Tiernan, impersonating a Rife flex. “I don’t like ‘em.”

Tiernan’s not alone, and Burr doesn’t think the hate is healthy. Why is everyone so obsessed with (probably) Rife’s success? “Younger comics, I get that because they started out at the same time. You’re young, you’re going to fall into that comparison stuff.”

But what’s the excuse for comedians of Burr’s generation? Burr is tired of “watching older comics having an issue with this person just because they’re successful,” he explained.

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...

Exclusive: Following the April release of his 10th comedy special, Tommy Tiernan: Tomfoolery, and a sold-out U.S. theatre tour in 2023, Irish comic Tommy Tiernan has announced North American theater tour dates for his new show, Tommy Tiernan: tommedian, which will see him visit 13 cities from coast to coast in October and November.

Produced by WestBeth Entertainment, Tiernan’s new show is described a a fun-fueled trip through his comic imagination — a wild, uninhibited and fiercely physical display of stand-up featuring a madcap parade of characters, memories and ridiculous flights of fancy. Tickets go on sale Friday, June 7 at 10:00 a.m. Local Time.

Also an actor, talk show host, writer and podcaster, Tiernan has been performing stand-up for close to 30 years. Outside of stand-up, he’s perhaps best known for starring in the hit Channel 4/Netflix series, Derry Girls, which won an International Emmy, a BAFTA and...

In its first season, HBO’s “Perry Mason” received Emmy and ASC award nominations for David Franco’s exquisitely atmospheric cinematography, which avoided the desaturated look so common to period shows and evoked the 1930s by referencing early color still photography. One might have thought it would be difficult to improve upon the look established by Franco and alternating cinematographer Darran Tiernan, but the new season of “Perry Mason” that premiered March 6 is even more vivid and involving thanks to slight changes in color and a more subjective approach to the camerawork.

When the gritty origin story of Erle Stanley Gardner’s defense attorney premiered in 2020, cinematographer Eliot Rockett was one of its fans. Now, he joins the series — along with showrunners Jack Amiel and Michael Begler — for Season 2, lensing the premiere and alternating subsequent episodes with Tiernan and John Grillo. “I thought the first season was great, so there...

Bruce Willis has never been one to shy away from roles that would require him to tackle some seriously madcap stunts. The series that immediately comes to mind is "Die Hard" of course, beginning with the very first installment, which premiered in 1988. It was a movie that completely rejuvenated the action film genre and kick-started Willis' career as the new everyman face of action heroes. But it also helped define the actor's appeal towards doing all his own stunts — and he couldn't have picked a better movie to learn a thing or two about the ins and outs of those dangers.

After all, most "Die Hard" films are themselves a veritable smorgasbord of visual effects mixed with seemingly perilous stunt work. But the first film in the series set the bar so high that subsequent films had a pretty hard time topping it while also keeping the realism factor well below "Fast & Furious.

It’s 1994, and the people of Northern Ireland are nearly three decades into a violent conflict known as the Troubles. Civilians — thousands of which died during the fray — are generally divided between Protestant unionists, who want to keep the country under United Kingdom control, and Irish Catholics, who call for a united Ireland. Day-to-day life in Derry involve armed military checkpoints, customary bomb disposals, and the constant hum of danger. Family members are in prison. Others are dead. An end to the Troubles is in sight, but for the teenage girls attending Our Lady Immaculate College, this is the only life they’ve ever known. That it may come to an end right as they graduate only instills further anxiety over the responsibilities of adulthood.

This is “Derry Girls” — or, at least, a version of “Derry Girls” if viewed through a popular storytelling vantage point; a version where the pain,...

Irish Travellers, Ireland’s indigenous ethnic population, are rarely shown in movies. When they are — think Brad Pitt as the incomprehensible bare-knuckled boxer in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch (2000) — the depiction, says Travellers filmmaker John Connors, is “superficial and patronizing… fucking terrible and insulting to be honest.”

At the same time, the Travellers community remains among the most disadvantaged and discriminated against in Western Europe, a legacy of generations of forced assimilation and active oppression by the Irish state. Part of this includes Ireland’s industrial schools’ program, a nationwide system of reform schools for “neglected, orphaned and abandoned children” that included a large number of Travellers kids. A national inquiry into the industrial schools’ program reported, in 2009, that many children had been subjected to “systematic and sustained physical, sexual and emotional abuse” and that the institutions, most of which were run by the Catholic Church, protected the abusers.

All that...

The actor discusses the stage adaptation of his memoir Walking With Ghosts, playing Samuel Beckett in a new film – and making peace with being an exile

There is a short video on YouTube of Gabriel Byrne being interviewed by the Irish comedian and actor Tommy Tiernan. “Do you think you’re a strange man?” asks Tiernan. “I do think I’m a strange man, yes,” replies Byrne without hesitation. He then bats the question back to Tiernan, deftly sidestepping any further discussion of the subject. I ask him if now he could elaborate on the nature of his strangeness.

“I like to think I’m pretty normal and not given to extremes, but people who know me well would probably think I’m a little strange,” he says. “It surprises me when they do, but, of course, an eccentric does not know he’s eccentric. So, yes, maybe I am a bit strange,...