ED BYRNE
As he embarks on his latest stand-up tour If I’m Honest, Irish comedian Ed Byrne spoke to Seren McKeever about how he generates new material and the personal politics of his family life.
Ed Byrne is a bit of a household name in British and Irish stand-up comedy. With frequent appearances on Mock The Week and Live At The Apollo, he’s established enough that even my granny has heard of him. Performing comedy since university, and now approaching 50, Byrne has firmly become one of the most well-known, and successful, names on the international comedy scene.
His latest show If I’m Honest sold out at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival. Now, a couple of months into a UK and Ireland tour, it’s hard to imagine there’s any new milestones for Byrne to hit. So, when I ask him what he’s particularly proud of about this show, he laughs.
“You sound like my mother,” he says. “But the British Comedy Guide website do this thing every year at the Edinburgh Fringe, where they write out the Top 20 most well-written shows, with the most four- and five-star reviews, and in something like 15 years since they’ve been counting, I’ve never been up there – until now.”
You would think that, having received such positive feedback, the show wouldn’t have changed much since its initial performances. However, Byrne tells me that it’s not quite stayed the same. Byrne has been on the circuit long enough that he knows good material when he comes across it, so he’s constantly self-editing, reading the room and working in new material whenever he sees fit.
“If I had sense about me, any new jokes that I come up with between then and now would be put away and used for the next show. But any time I think, yeah, that’s funny, I add it in. By the time it gets to Wales, it’s going to be insane!”
If I’m Honest is Byrne’s looking into his own family life, what it’s like for him being a husband, as well as a father to two young boys. It is, like most good comedy, an intensely personal look at himself: in his own words, it’s his way of trying to figure out what traits he has that are “worth passing onto the next generation.”
While the audience might enjoy Byrne’s deep look into his personal life, I wonder if getting up on stage in front of hundreds of people can ever take it out of him. Is the material he’s doing difficult to perform, or is he able to just have fun with it?
“There’s always bits with these shows that you’re just looking forward to doing – I have a routine about how, as a middle-aged man, it’s very important to me that my wife has a friend who’s married to a man who’s useless. To have another man in your life who’s a worse father, and worse husband than you are. It’s one of those ones that just seems to resonate with a lot of people, and I just enjoy doing it.”
With the content of If I’m Honest being so focused on Byrne himself, has the current political climate – with Brexit and the general election looming in the future – had any particular impact on his own brand of comedy? Or is he tired of hearing about it?
“Party politics doesn’t play a role in this show at all, it’s more personal politics, really,” he tells me. “But I have two boys and we’re trying not to do that typical thing of: if you’re a boy, if you’re a man, you have to do this, and you have to do that. So, there’s a routine about that, sending boys to ballet classes, which I’m quite enjoying doing. Again, it’s the personal political, rather than anything else.”
So if you – like, we’d wager, most of the country by this point – are suffering from pre-polling day ennui, and just want a good old laugh, this might be your perfect show.
Grand Theatre, Swansea, Thurs 5 Dec. Tickets: £27. Info: 01792 475715 / swanseagrand.co.uk. St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Sat 21 March. Tickets: £27.50. Info: 029 2087 8444 / stdavidshallcardiff.co.uk
