Comedy: Ed Byrne
"If it's real, it makes it so much better. It gives it much more authenticity and has far greater punch. You could be accused of self-indulgence, but my experience has been that audiences really like it when you reveal something of yourself on stage. It's not funny unless they believe it.
"For instance, one section of (new show) Different Class that goes down very well is where I talk about my status. I discuss the difficulty of neither being massively famous nor totally obscure and how strange it is simply to be known as 'that bloke'. The audience really enjoy the feeling of getting to know me better."
Part of the show, which sold out its month-long last year's Edinburgh Fringe, concerns his recent wedding.
He jokes, for example, that, "the best thing is that since I've been married, I haven't had to plan a ******* wedding!" And wants to congratulate the man who invented the tradition that the groom should never see his bride's dress before The Big Day.
"I want to shake his hand for getting us out of that particular shopping expedition. 'Honey, nothing would give me greater pleasure than watching you try on an infinity of wedding dresses!'"
He adds: "I'm not slagging off my wife, I'm slagging off the wedding industry. Everyone can relate to the minor frustrations that any wedding involves, such as arguing about stuff that you don't really care about."
The comic also proffers some very strong material on that perennial obsession: the class system.
"Pheasant is posh," he muses at one point, "even if you eat it with Alphabetti Spaghetti!"
The stand-up observes that, "we're all fascinated by the subject of class, and there's a lot of comic mileage in it. It's a leitmotif that runs through the show. The funny thing is, when I've been asking the audience 'who would call themselves middle class?', only one brave soul usually puts his hand up."
He adds: "I've been reliably informed that this is my best show yet. It's partly down to experience. More than anything, though, as mushy as it sounds, it's down to the love of a good woman. That really helps my comedy because it means I'm freer to focus on it.
"In 2004, a lot of my show was centred on my bitterness about a previous girlfriend. It was cathartic, but at the same time it wasn't very fair, as she wasn't there to stand up for herself. That style didn't suit me. I think what I'm doing now suits me much better.
"I'm now leading a life that lends itself much better to comedy. I'm doing lovely things like getting married and reporting on that and audiences seem to warm to it."
Never more than a minute or two away from the next joke, Ed concludes with a mischievous grin that, "of course, if my wife ever left me, I'd end up doing the divorce show, and it's quite possible that wouldn't go down very well at all."
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Ed Byrne
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