Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Stand-up director Paul Byrne had such influence and respect in comedy that many comics have built routines commemorating him after his death at 44 in February last year. Now it’s time to hear from the man who knew him longest, his elder brother Ed, forced to write the show he never wanted to.

But he hasn’t spent three decades being an impish, flippant comedian only to abandon it for sentimentality now. Paul shared Ed’s mischievous sense of humour and belief in the primacy of a joke, and he would certainly have insisted that his brother mark his death with not only humour, but humour in dubious taste.

This was the man, after all, who left instructions for which track should be played as his coffin vanished into the crematorium’s flames – the dancefloor banger Disco Inferno, with its catchy refrain, ‘Burn, baby, burn’.

In that spirit, then, Ed has this show build up to what he bills as ‘the darkest joke I’ve ever told’. And, man, is it horrid. But piss-funny precisely because of that. Many a comic aims for that gag that makes the audience gasp and guffaw almost simultaneously, and Byrne’s jaw-dropping contribution achieves the widest possible swing between those two states.

But first, the business of painting a picture of what manner of man Paul was. An often difficult one, is the answer, certainly when it came to the relationship with his sibling, and the two frequently bashed heads, both of them being stubborn and argumentative. Paul was also a terrible uncle, a funny man, and a social creature who drank too much, which is what landed him in hospital the first of many times.

Tragedy Plus Time – titled after the definition of comedy attributed to Mark Twain but more likely said by American comic Steve Allen – takes many digressions from this. Byrne justifies this, as if he needed to, by explaining that’s what life’s like. Grief isn’t 24/7. Life, even happy life, continues - but the feeling of loss will always be there waiting for you later.

Not only do these routines showcase the precision-engineered observational comedy Byrne has become known for, but they allow him to seed ideas, phrases and punchlines that pay off with payday-loan levels of interest when he calls back to them later in this carefully constructed hour.

So we hear about the cheerfully awful customer service after his car was broken into, the outrageously ill-informed expression ‘an Irish goodbye’, some gratuitously vicious swipes at some specific comedians more successful than him, and Covid conspiracy theorists – all told with over-the-top frustation at the idiocy of the world and its inhabitants. Meanwhile, clashes with the ‘plandemic’ crew taught him how counterproductive it is to argue with stupid people, since they only double down on their ignorance.

It didn’t stop him rowing with the certainly-not-stupid Paul, though, and they had a fierce showdown over… well, satnav… that almost derailed their relationship completely. Imagine if those was the last, furious words they exchanged. And believe me, Ed does.

As the clock advances to Paul’s final days and hours, the mood of the show understandably darkens, though even here there is a relief in humour. Especially when Ed tells us how he essentially DJed his brother’s last moments with the most awful tracks from his phone. His choices were no Disco Inferno, that’s for sure.

Putting tragedy at the heart of a comedy show has become commonplace, but Byrne has actually put the celebration of a fraternal bond and a warning about wasted opportunities at the heart of this. Touching and inspiring, yes, but funny above all else. It’s what he would have wanted.

Review date: 10 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Assembly Rooms