Ed Byrne is a comedian who says a lot in a short space of time; he speaks fast and covers a lot of ground. It was expected therefore that his currently touring 2-hour stand-up show would rove through a range of different topics; at his recent ‘back-by-popular-demand’ return to Lowther Pavilion though, it was astonishing just how much material was covered.
Throughout the night Byrne touches on corporate entertainment, one-night stands, ‘girls shoes’ for boys, the joys of defecating, coffee shop snobbery, the moments when dates go wrong, vasectomy, the world banking crisis, Australian media and trainee doctors, amongst others.
He guides us through his now middle-aged life which seems to be plagued by his own ability to get himself into trouble; gone are his heady days of being snubbed by girls in bars, now he is more about being flabby and skinny at the same time and how to manage being a dad in a judgemental world. He invites audience interaction and talks of the best and worst of viewers stories from the tour so far, there’s one entirely non-gratuitous and well-crafted use of the c-word and a line that apparently The Telegraph objected to about diarrhoea being akin to oxtail soup in a soda stream which is explosively funny.
There are a few other laugh-out-loud moments but generally this is not a night of comedy crescendos; not one to leave your cheeks aching or your mind racing with steal-able punch-lines; it’s more akin to sitting in the pub with a good friend being pleasantly entertained. Before this gig, I wondered why Byrne, in spite of his successful TV career, hadn’t made it to the arena style venues that his peers can now easily fill and it’s clear that his comedy set is just too gentle to take on that size of crowd; that’s not a criticism – it’s just a different thing.
The show ends with a projection of a picture of his son proudly wearing a pair of (hitherto controversial amongst the nursery-set) pink sparkly shoes and you are left with the sense that Ed Byrne is a nice guy; he’s an amiable, chatty, funny man who has an amusing perspective on everyday life with just a lightly-suppressed layer of vitriol under the still floppy-haired, Lefty-student surface.
Byrne has played the Blackpool and Fylde area three times already on his current tour and has added further dates to the line-up of medium-sized venues. If you enjoy your comedy like a cup of warm cocoa with a shot of Jamesons then I would recommend looking up the future dates, although no doubt there will be another tour; Byrne has been a successful stand-up comic for 22-years; it’s unlikely he’s going to disappear off the circuit at any point soon.
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