’s latest show, Tragedy Plus Time, a title paraphrased from the adage attributed to Mark Twain: “Comedy is tragedy plus time.”
His older brother introduced him to the work of Billy Connolly at a young age . “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.”
“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.” 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.
“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.
“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.
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”.