It says much for Ed Byrne’s talents as a stand-up that he can make his show Different Class, which he first performed a year ago, feel fresh and current. But with topical gags aplenty - many of which must have been written just hours before he took the stage at the Vaudeville Theatre in London, where is doing a month-long residency - it feels bang up to the minute.
The show is ostensibly about Byrne’s confusion about where he, an Irishman, fits into the British class system. It’s simpler in Ireland, he says, because you just ask if someone has a horse - you’re upper-class if you can afford one, and working class if you have a caravan to go with it. But much of the highly entertaining set is about the trials and tribulations of getting married, as Byrne did last year. The vexations were nothing to do with the woman he loves, you understand, but the horrors of dealing with wedding planners and their obsessions with things such as floral arrangements for tables and the all important difference between a cream- or ivory-coloured bridal outfit.
In less assured hands, such a subject could make for a dull evening. But Byrne’s observational comedy, a winning mix of genial delivery and well directed sarcasm, allows us laughs of recognition as well as ridicule. And what could be more ridiculous than the prices wedding planners charge for services you never knew you needed, such as sending out invitations at a cost of £10 per guest?
Earlier in his career, Byrne’s sometimes laddish material wasn’t to everyone’s taste, including my own. But as he has extended his presentational skills - he’s now so much more physical about the stage - so has his material matured. There are clever and thoughtful (and very funny) riffs on feminism and the depressing idiocy of Wags, but the material is not remotely po-faced or PC. And it’s certainly not predictable; one extended gag, about how provocatively some parents dress their young daughters these days (he saw an 11-year-old with the word "gorgeous" emblazoned across the backside of her tracksuit trousers), has a brilliant payoff that comes from the blindside. Byrne also gives his keen intelligence freer rein these days - he puts "WB Yeats" and "Yates wine lodge" in a sentence together just as a throwaway line, a sign of someone who takes real delight in language and his ability to play with it.
He is happy to be the butt of a joke, too, describing himself as having gone from "comedy’s next big thing" to "that bloke off the telly". He’s a self-confessed pedant and stickler for detail, and things he should have said or done but didn’t still bug him years after the event. And he bemoans how a Wag’s workout DVD outsold his own to great comedic effect. But maybe the DVD of this show, out on November 23, will surpass Coleen Rooney’s latest oeuvre.
Byrne says he doesn’t know if he’s working-class or middle-class; on this showing, he’s simply a class act.
At the Vaudeville Theatre, London WC2 until October 3. Book tickets online
Then touring until November 28. Book tickets online
In less assured hands, such a subject could make for a dull evening. But Byrne’s observational comedy, a winning mix of genial delivery and well directed sarcasm, allows us laughs of recognition as well as ridicule. And what could be more ridiculous than the prices wedding planners charge for services you never knew you needed, such as sending out invitations at a cost of £10 per guest?
Earlier in his career, Byrne’s sometimes laddish material wasn’t to everyone’s taste, including my own. But as he has extended his presentational skills - he’s now so much more physical about the stage - so has his material matured. There are clever and thoughtful (and very funny) riffs on feminism and the depressing idiocy of Wags, but the material is not remotely po-faced or PC. And it’s certainly not predictable; one extended gag, about how provocatively some parents dress their young daughters these days (he saw an 11-year-old with the word "gorgeous" emblazoned across the backside of her tracksuit trousers), has a brilliant payoff that comes from the blindside. Byrne also gives his keen intelligence freer rein these days - he puts "WB Yeats" and "Yates wine lodge" in a sentence together just as a throwaway line, a sign of someone who takes real delight in language and his ability to play with it.
He is happy to be the butt of a joke, too, describing himself as having gone from "comedy’s next big thing" to "that bloke off the telly". He’s a self-confessed pedant and stickler for detail, and things he should have said or done but didn’t still bug him years after the event. And he bemoans how a Wag’s workout DVD outsold his own to great comedic effect. But maybe the DVD of this show, out on November 23, will surpass Coleen Rooney’s latest oeuvre.
Byrne says he doesn’t know if he’s working-class or middle-class; on this showing, he’s simply a class act.
At the Vaudeville Theatre, London WC2 until October 3. Book tickets online
Then touring until November 28. Book tickets online
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