Is there no end to the man’s talents? A staple of revered panel show Mock the Week, Ed Byrne has also sledded down the side of a volcano for Dara and Ed’s Great Big Adventure, upstaged Martin Sheen and Robert Downey Jr on The Graham Norton Show, and demonstrated his driving skills on Top Gear and The World’s Most Dangerous Road. He’s also proven himself to be quiz show dynamite on the likes of The Chase: Celebrity Special, The Hit List, Pointless Celebrities and All-Star Family Fortunes. Never agree to attend a pub quiz with Ed Byrne. You will lose.
But for all his dalliances with the world of television light entertainment, Ed remains at heart one of the world’s truly great stand-up comedians. He has honed his craft for a remarkable 30 years now, garnering a hatful of awards and a constant, borderline bewildering stream of five-star reviews along the way. Whisper it, but it’s tempting in 2023 to take story-telling skills and a wit as sublime as Ed’s for granted.
However, with his 14th show, Tragedy Plus Time, audiences need to ready themselves because Ed Byrne is heading into highly emotional new territory.
“It’s something of a departure, and I’m slightly worried about that,” he concedes. “I’ve never really had the desire to write a show that had an overly serious element to it. I got a lot of five-star reviews on the last show [2019’s If I’m Honest], but some four-star ones that opined, ‘well it’s funny, but that’s all it is…’ As if that’s not enough these days. Frankly, just being funny is a furrow I’ve been happy to occupy. But this new show features some heart-wrenching, soul-bearing stuff.”
That much is indisputable. For Tragedy Plus Time, Ed bravely ventures into the world of grief and loss, a decision prompted by the passing of his younger brother Paul, aged just 44, in February 2022. Comedy that takes death as its cue is not unprecedented, but it’s a path that takes considerable creative courage to explore.
“I was in two minds about whether to do a show of this nature,” Ed explains. “Then I decided this was the subject I was going to tackle but I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. But once I started down that road, that was it… Then my main worry was, how funny is it going to be and is it going to work?”
These were legitimate concerns. Of course, there’s funny and there’s funny. In Tragedy Plus Time, Ed consistently delivers the latter while expertly locating the poignancy that sits at the intersection of sadness and loss. This isn’t gallows humour; this is something else altogether.
“The first time I performed it,” he continues, “it lasted more than an hour. That surprised me, but it was too long, so I had to decide whether to cut funny jokes or material that’s meaningful. That kind of decision was new to me, and what’s really annoying is that the one person I would have asked for advice on that is the guy the show’s about.
Says Ed, “I’ve spoken to people who worked with Paul, who was a comedy director, and they’ve said that his thing was, ‘you can be as emotional as you like and as serious as you like, but there has to be a joke’. So the idea of saying something purely for the emotional gut punch was off the table.”
Nor is Tragedy Plus Time unrelenting by any means. The genius of it is that it takes the most difficult of subject matter and encourages the audience to laugh in its face in a way they would otherwise simply never do. Ed has also deliberately eschewed a linear narrative structure in favour of an approach that mirrors the unpredictable nature of grief itself.
Ed Byrne is touring nationwide and you can see him at the Rotherham Civic Theatre on Wednesday 5th February. For more information, visit www.edbyrne.com.