Interview: Ed Byrne

Ian: So, your tour’s titled Tragedy Plus Time. Why?

Ed: Well, it's the definition of comedy. It's said to be Mark Twain who came up with it, but there's actually no proof. Mark Twain's a bit like Tommy Cooper in that, if in doubt, just credit him. But no, it was actually a guy called Steve Allen who came up with it: that comedy could be defined as tragedy, plus time. Something that's not funny can become funny later, once enough time has elapsed. And originally the show was going to be that whole idea. You know, how much time has to elapse, and how big a tragedy, and all that. One of the tragedies I was going to talk about was the fact that my little brother died a couple of years ago. Slowly and surely as I was writing the show, that became pretty much the subject matter for the whole show. So, there's a little bit about a very minor tragedy that befell me, my car being broken into, and how not funny as it was at the time. Yet, I was on stage the very next night, making jokes about it. Because that's what you do. The death of a sibling takes a little bit longer before you can start making jokes about it. It took about a year before I was able to start writing it.

Ian: And you're at a point where you can joke about this terrible loss?

Ed: Oh, absolutely. I've been doing this show now for a year. I did it first at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, and I'm going to still be touring it April of next year. It's been particularly well received but also it's a show that's going to be difficult to let go once I'm finished with it.

Ian: Is it a therapeutic way of dealing with grief?

Ed: Laughter is a way of dealing with grief. People, when they come and see the show, will be aware that's exactly what they're watching. A man dealing with his grief the best way he knows how. But as regards actually being therapeutic, I'm not sure, raking over the coals of my brother's death five nights a week, 45 weeks a year, is very healthy. A therapist would tell me to knock it on the head.

Ian: Have you ever experienced depression?

No, I don't think I have. Actually, we all get the blues. I think depression is a very serious thing, and I don't actually like it when people who are just sad, refer to themselves as depressed. It's like when people say, Oh, I've been OCD, when they mean they're quite neat. I think I'm pretty lucky in my overall mental health.

Ian: So why did you become a comedian?

Ed: Oh, considering I'm not depressed?

Ian: ! (Lost for a reply)

Ed: I've always been a fan of it. And I've always been quite a funny bloke. And when I was at university I really started to think, (well, technically, I was at university, I was working as a sabbatical officer in the student union, paid to be a pretend student. Those student union positions where you run for election, then you take a year out of your studies and work in the Student Union. I did that.) And while I was doing that, I had to make a lot of speeches in front of, not necessarily, the most interested crowds. So, I would jazz them up with gags. I was also working with a guy who was friends with an American comedian. This guy was convinced that I should become a comic. So, he used to write down funny things I'd say in meetings and then present them to me at end of the month, and go ‘look these are all the funny things you'd said. You should be a comedian’. So, yeah, I bought a dictaphone and started recording any funny thing that crossed my mind, and trying to build an act.

Ian: You're an Irishman living in England. Do Brits look at life the same way as the Irish? 

Ed: I've found with this show Irish people have a slightly more irreverent, a healthy irreverence, when it comes to death, compared to your stiff upper lip Brits. The concept of the wake is an Irish tradition. So the Irish are not as shocked by the glib way I deal with death in the show as some English audiences are.

Ian: I wondered what brought you to atheism.

Ed: So, I was an altar boy as a kid, and very much bought into the whole thing. When I slowly but surely realized that it was horseshit, I was actually quite angry about the whole thing. I was embarrassed about believing in the first place. And I think that's why I became not just an atheist, but a humanist, where you actually rail against it. Even if you believe in God, it seems to me morally wrong to have the same people who are teaching you that Paris is the capital of France, and that is an oxbow lake, and this is the Irish word for whatever, are the same people who teach you that Jesus did this, and God did that, and Adam and Eve and all that. It shouldn't be taught as an absolute fact as it was to me when I was growing up.

Everybody feels more than happy to take and leave the bits of the Bible they want to exactly. You'll get people who'll cling tenaciously to the bit about man lying with man as he does a woman, yeah, and how evil that is. But we'll just completely gloss over the whole ‘do unto others, as you'd have them do unto you’. Nobody's actually calling for the death of people who collect twigs on a Sunday, you know? So that's why I swung the other way as hard as I did. 

Humanists campaign to have religion removed from schools and the members of the House of Lords who sit there as religious appointees. That whole lack of separation of church and state. I became quite hardheaded about it. Now I'm a bit more accepting that it gives a lot of people a lot of comfort. What also annoys me is the amount of time wasted on it. I mean, as an altar boy it was great, because I got to skive off school. But, just in education, the amount of time spent doing your confirmation, first communion. I mean, that's time that could be spent, studying science, doing PE or litter picking.

Ian: Do you get nervous before a gig?

Ed: I don't so much anymore. I get nervous before the first gig of a run somewhere. Sometimes, if I'm in a country where I haven't done that show before, and I'm not 100% sure how it's going to fly, I get nervous like, first night of the Edinburg fringe. Because, that's the start of the next two years touring, and it's going to dictate how your whole life is going to be for the next while. And I get nervous before corporate gigs, because audiences are not there to see you.

Alcohol helps. Before a gig, I like a hazy IPA and I have a tradition now, called a pre-show pint, where I go and find a hostelry that brews its own beer.

Ian: How do you go about writing a joke?

Ed: Sometimes you have an opinion you want to get across, and you think of a way to make it funny. Other times, it'll just be a conversation where you'll say something funny and it makes the person you're with laugh, and then you're going, right how do I use that? But I don't sit down at a computer and go, right, what's funny?

With this show, there's the story I need to tell, so it’s about how do I make the story funny. Other times you set yourself a target to write a joke on something that actually forces you to write something better than you would have done otherwise.

I remember I had a routine about not really liking interviews. And trying to get from that to talking about not being good at sports. I ended up writing a whole routine about sports interviews as a way to get from one subject to another. The routine about sports interviews ended up funnier than the topic I was bridging from. Necessity is the mother of invention, isn't it?

Ian: What advice would you give young people wanting to get into stand-up?

Ed: Well, the wonderful thing about being in this business as long as I have, is that my advice is now absolutely useless. The advice I used to give was pretty solid: wait until you're good enough before you start trying for TV. Don't do the biggest comedy club in your town for your first gig, find the small, crappy little room, get good and then phone the Glee club or the Comedy Store. You know, wait until you've been doing it a few years. That's the kind of advice I used to offer.

But the stand-up landscape has changed completely. Now it's all about: get a decent camera, get savvy with editing software, record stuff. Just put as much content on the net as you can. Content, content, content. Put it out there. That’s now how you build a career. I’d be lost if I was starting out as a comedian today.

But I would say, write everything down or record everything, because thirty years down the track, there's jokes I used to do that I could probably take down off the shelf and repurpose now and breathe new life into but I've forgotten them!

Ian: What's next for Ed after the tour?

Ed: The next show, hopefully, will get back to being straight up funny and not have a serious bit. Also, I have ambitions to write something other than stand-up, a novel or a comedy drama or something. I am feeling more and more I’m going to need a break from stand-up. I do need to write something else. So, yeah, I have a few ideas, which I don't want to ruin by saying them out loud. I have a notion of a fictitious memoir. A book that would take the form of a showbiz memoir, but of somebody who doesn't actually exist. Yeah, I think that would be my next move.

Ed Byrne's Tragedy Plus Time appears at the Palace Theatre Newark on Saturday 28 September 2024.