Can grief ever be funny? That is the theme at the heart of Dublin-born, Essex-based comic Ed Byrne’s latest show, Tragedy Plus Time, a title paraphrased from the adage attributed to Mark Twain: “Comedy is tragedy plus time.”
The show is about Ed’s younger brother Paul, who died from liver failure in 2022, at the age of just 44, following a battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer which attacks the lymph nodes. Paul was a stalwart in the comedy scene, having worked as a comedy director, stand-up fixer and writer, developing shows with Andrew Maxwell among others. His sense of humour was deliciously dark and sardonic: as per his wishes, he was cremated to the upbeat sounds of the Trammps’s Disco Inferno; to the lyrics “burn, baby, burn” specifically.
In life, the two Byrne boys never worked together. So, in a way, this is their first collaboration. “I had discussions with him about this [show] before he died,” Byrne says from the attic of his home via Zoom. “He had this joke, which is now in my show, that was to do with him needing a liver transplant. This was something he found really difficult because he needed someone to die for him to live, and that was a lot to take on. It’s a weighty thing to reckon with. And then he goes: “But you know what? Two people probably f*ckin’ died to make my iPhone. So there’s that.”
Ed was born the third of four children in Swords, north Dublin in 1972. His parents were funny. “My dad was someone who would rely quite heavily on repeated lines,” he smiles. “His favourite thing was to shout, audibly, when people were leaving our house: I’m glad they’re gone, only for us to laugh uproariously and make an obvious scene to let people know it was a joke.”
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His older brother introduced him to the work of Billy Connolly at a young age (“10, maybe. 11? I can’t remember”). “I guess that probably would have cemented in my mind that comedy is a real thing that people do. I actually remember being compared favourably to Billy once, but only in the sense that I also swear a lot, but in a way that your granny wouldn’t mind.”
At 18, Byrne availed of the European Social Fund, a scheme that paid university fees for anyone from the EU looking to attend a third-level institution in another EU country, to study in Glasgow where he started a comedy club for beginners. “I was encouraged to do so by way of a friend called Chris Stewart, who was friends with a guy who was a comedian and actually thought I was funnier,” he says.
“He wrote down funny lines I’d come out with and at the end of the month or so he confronted me with this list and said: look, this is how funny you are. Then, I bought a dictaphone and got to work.” There was something else that pushed him too.
“I benefited hugely from the transformative nature of living abroad and the reinvention that it affords you. I don’t know if I would have given stand-up a go if I had stayed in Ireland.”
Though he might disagree, Byrne has become known as a comic’s comic, one who shuns the idea of ego and commits to the art of crafting comedic specials centred around normality. Well known in Britain and Ireland for bolstering panel shows such as Mock the Week and Have I Got News for You, his career received an early boost when he was nominated for the prestigious Perrier Comedy Award at the 1998 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
On stage and screen, he is eminently watchable and seemingly fearless – he has taken part in a number of wacky, whimsical TV endeavours, including sledding down the side of a volcano for best friend Dara Ó Briain (for their weddings, the men were each other’s best man; they met on an Irish panel show and immediately bonded over the terrible audience). He has also demonstrated his questionable driving skills on Top Gear and The World’s Most Dangerous Road.
Above all, however, it is his observational stage comedy that remains his hallmark. Tragedy Plus Time is Byrne’s fourteenth show. A sprawling set about death, grief and mortality, Byrne premiered it at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, where it received praise for its ferocious blend of unblinking tragedy with raucous laugh-out-loud lines like: “It should have been you,” the sentence Ed said to his other brother the day Paul died.
If I got dumped, I wrote a show. I once did 15 minutes on getting a cat
“I have had people walk out,” Byrne says. “There’s a lot of dark comedy and moments where some people can find it too disturbing or inappropriate. But I feel that because it’s about my personal grief, it’s not particularly offensive in the way a stand-up show can be. I’m not talking about your sexuality or a disease you had or whatever, it’s my sh** I’m talking about, and I just know I am at peace with it because it’s me.”
Stand-up comedy is usually considered a space designed to conjure up joy. It may have its sad moments, but the plots generally arc towards a central cheerfulness, returning to a baseline that insists that life, even in its bad moments, is purposeful, promising and, crucially, somewhere from which to mine content.
Byrne usually sticks to this practice – “I have always just done shows about whatever is going on in my life; If I got dumped, I wrote a show. I once did 15 minutes on getting a cat” – but Tragedy Plus Time feels different. More flagrant in its candour without sacrificing the black humour many of us rely on to get through a bereavement, it is in many ways a cultural rarity, one which only lands because of Byrne’s comedic chops.
“I remember watching Patton Oswald when his wife died, he did 10 or 15 minutes in his show on that. And Doug Stanhope actually assisted in his mother’s demise, she had terminal cancer and he sat with her and gave her liquid morphine until she shuffled off, and he did a routine about that,” he says.
“So I’d seen it done and I knew there was a lot of funny stuff and interesting stories surrounding Paul’s death that I could use. The idea was about the darkest of humour being what you need to get you through the darkest times, and then I digress; I take a pop at James Corden; I say how I’m not as famous as I’d like to be; I do a bit about conspiracy theories. But it all goes back to Paul. In fact, of all the shows I’ve ever done, this one has stuck most rigidly to the story that’s introduced at the centre.”
Comics have long positioned themselves as champions of provocation to their audiences, from the live populist entertainment of the vaudeville era to the political humour of Byrne’s comedic godfather Billy Connolly.
Today, comics like Ali Wong, Nikki Glaser and Daniel Sloss are finding new ways to expose audiences to societal fault lines. But in the era of culture wars, does Byrne think audiences want to be challenged or comforted?
I know when I do it in Dublin, I’ll be extremely emotional. It’ll be my sister’s first time seeing the show. It’ll be my ma’s second time seeing it
“I do think the ‘you can’t say anything any more’ brigade have overblown it slightly,” he says. “There’s always been a moral panic with what you can and can’t say in comedy. And it’s just the case of those subjects and that subject matter changes over time. There was once a time when Princess Diana was fair game, and then, when she died, she became this saint you couldn’t touch. Honestly, most of it is Twitter. If you say something offensive on Twitter, for some reason that will land you in trouble.
“We realised that 15 years ago, when Ricky Gervais, who had been doing a routine that mentioned [former Britain’s Got Talent contestant and singer] Susan Boyle and everybody came down on him when he posted it in a tweet. And people still kept falling foul of that one. On stage, people like Gervais or Dave Chappelle are still doing sets that people say will “end their careers”, and they’re getting away with it because they’re doing it well.
“What happens is you’ve got these new comics who’ve been doing comedy a wet day, who want to go straight from open mic to tackling those kinds of subjects, say sexual assault, mental health, that kind of thing. They throw that out with no experience and wonder why it’s not working. They are really tricky subjects that people think will put them on the edge of what is and isn’t acceptable. But actually, they’re just being offensive and it’s not working.”
The dark comedy Byrne employs on this tour – which see him play venues in Ireland, New Zealand and Britain until the end of the year –– might enjoy a more circumscribed kind of success; earning passionate but smaller audiences, given the subject matter. But it’s a format that enables Byrne to infuse his show with bouts of sincerity and self-inquiry in a way that feels fresh and brave.
On certain nights he has felt it more than others – on Paul’s second anniversary, Byrne performed in Barnsley, where the audience applauded and he cried – but overall, he insists it has been a “very positive experience”.
“In a way, every show is another goodbye,” he smiles. “So I may end up doing it for longer than I normally would.”
“I know when I do it in Dublin, I’ll be extremely emotional. It’ll be my sister’s first time seeing the show. It’ll be my ma’s second time seeing it. My dad has actually seen it, in Edinburgh, but he didn’t have his hearing aid switched on, so it may be his first time experiencing it, too. So that’ll be emotional, but I’m so grateful I get to do something like this.”
Has delivering the story every night made him consider his own mortality?
“I can’t say that it has really,” he muses. “I’m not sure that it’s made me consider my legacy or anything like that. I think I’m just more considerate of other people’s mortalities. One thing I have decided is that life is too short to put up with people I don’t like. I resolved to make more of an effort with the people I do [like], and as for the people I don’t ... I just can’t be arsed.”
The final thing Byrne mentions before we go is hillwalking. A fervent hillwalker from his teens, Byrne took up the sport by way of a secondary schoolteacher who encouraged his pupils to get out in the world.
“We had a guy called Joe McDermott who was a teacher in our Christian Brothers school in Swords and he was a qualified mountain leader, so he started a hillwalking club with us,” he says. “I was never into team sports, but I’m actually not bad at getting up a mountain.”
I ask what it is that draws him to it. “I like the sense of achievement. One of my favourite things in the whole world is to do a multi-day hike and to be standing on a high point and looking into the distance and at the scenery, and thinking two days from now you’re going to be there. To pretend, just for a moment, that you’re participating in the landscape that you’re staring at, as opposed to just getting out of the car to look at a lovely view. There’s something very romantic about that to me. And I enjoy that I’m able to do that.”
Ed Byrne plays Derry on June 20th, Belfast on June 21st, Dublin on June 22nd and Galway on June 23rd. For more details, see edbyrne.com