I would have thought that the biggest bugbear of the celebrity lifestyle is the constant stream of people wanting to bend your ear, borrow money or just have their photo taken with you. But in comedian Ed Byrne’s world there’s another bug to bear.
“It may just be an Irish thing, but every now and then I meet a guy who wants me to know that he doesn’t know me at all," he says. "I might be signing autographs in a bar or whatever and he’ll see me and come over and he’ll say, ‘Hey, why are signing these? Are you famous or something? I don’t know who you are at all?’”
So how does he respond to these begrudgers? “Sometimes I ask them they’re name and when they answer I’ll tell them I don’t know who they are either. Or I might say, 'Jaysus, you must have a very busy life if you have to go around telling everybody you don’t know them. See that fella over there? Why don’t you go over and tell him you don’t know him?' That usually keeps them quiet!”
Being a fully-paid up member of the comedians' union has other drawbacks too.
“It’s not that people want you to be funny all the time, but they’ll laugh immediately when you tell them you’re a comedian," he says. "Some people think they can be offensive and because you’re a comedian you should be able to take it. On the other hand, being a comedian seems to take the edge off any flippant remark you might make. It’s as if being a comedian gives both sides a license to say things they might not normally say.”
Byrne believes that there are no taboo subjects in comedy. “I think you can make a joke about anything, whether its religion or race or anything, but some subjects have to be handled carefully. I once told a joke about Christopher Reeves when he was wheelchair bound with his spinal injuries. Some people’s ears perk up the minute they hear a comedian say the word ‘wheelchair’ or ‘handicapped’ but he wasn’t the butt of the joke and nor was his disability. It was actually a point I was making about the reaction of some people to a TV commercial that showed him out of his wheelchair and gave people false hope if they had similar disabilities.”
Byrne likes to have a smoke and a drink while on stage, although he can’t smoke now in Ireland or Scotland, but sometimes it can lead to his downfall, and in Edinburgh recently on stage with Adam Bloom, literally so. “I was doing what we call spritzing, talking to the audience. I was a bit drunk, and I told a joke about the magician David Copperfield. A while later I told the exact same joke again! I knew there was something wrong when I got a stunned silence at the end. Then Adam told me I’d told it already. I was so embarrassed I just lay on the floor. It was awful!”
In the ‘60s, the American comedian and bane of the establishment Lenny Bruce was pilloried for his use of “bad” language and his irreverence towards authority, but since then a stream of comedians from Dave Allen to Tommy Tiernan have stirred up controversy in similar fashion, as did Byrne’s own comedy heroes Bill Hicks and Denis Leary. So why does profanity seem to be such an increasingly regular feature of comedy?
“It’s not essential, but it doesn’t matter any more," he maintains. "People hardly notice it if you use words like 'fuck' and 'shit' and so on. A lot of my comedy is based on anger and just giving out about things, so that kind of language is perfectly natural. Some people have said that if I would curb my use of that kind of language it would be even more effective when I used it. But that would be unnatural for me. That would be contrived. I’m not going to hold back on the fucks just to help a joke along.”
Given that Byrne has performed all over the planet, and has clocked up five appearances on Late Night With Conan O’Brien on NBC in the USA, I wonder if Irish audiences are different from those abroad.
“The best thing about performing in Ireland is that they don’t think my accent is funny," he says. "In lots of other places like England I’ll have people tell me that they think my accent is funny and no matter what I say they laugh at it. It’s fucking weird!”
The release of a DVD will no doubt mean that a vast audience will become even more familiar with Byrne’s material. But does doing a lot of TV and releasing DVDs eat into a comedian’s material? “The Pedantic and Whimsical DVD was filmed at the City Varieties in Leeds earlier this year and it’s a kind of Greatest Hits package," Byrne explains. "It contains a lot of my best material from the past 10 years, but only about 15 minutes was from my current set. In a way it’s a bit of a trade off. In the days when TV audiences for shows like the Royal Variety Show or Des O’Connor were vast, you traded a bit of extra fame for the fact that you were killing off some of your material. Now with so many more TV channels, you don’t quite get the same mass audience, so it’s not such a problem for comedians today.”
With the Irish comedy circuit seemingly going from strength I ask him who he thinks of the new breed deserves our special attention.
“Jarlath Regan. I saw him play to 3,000 people and I thought he was too new and that they’d kill him. I was wrong. He was brilliant. He’s definitely one to watch.”