★★★☆☆

Review by John Gibson Venue 35. Assembly Hall – Main Hall.

With many performers boycotting or shortening their runs this year, the big four (Pleasance, Gilded Balloon, Underbelly and Assembly) will dominate more than usual.  Arriving back from Glasgow (who have managed to close their entire city centre for a global cycling event with little disruption, whilst Edinburgh burns it’s memorial benches because ‘we just forgot’) this major Fringe show seemed like the perfect example of the future of the Fringe: After twenty-five minutes I realised that there had been nothing that could be considered material.  In fact, to listen to the vast majority of Byrne’s act it would be hard to discern whether this was being performed in 2003 or 2023.  

‘Remember the eighties’ slideshow, replete with obligatory reference to the eccentric ex-Guinness employee dad, tends to stereotype large swathes of his audience, and there were many observations that caught such low-hanging fruit. Byrne is an agile performer who channels Billy Connolly style angry improvisations about rubbish audience responses, but is far more conventional and mainstream than his peers. Evidently, through his development he had some excellent career advice; forgoing the evolutionary approach to the art and treating stand-up as a product (which it most certainly is, at the highest level).

Then it happened: riffing on the news that the Scottish Parliament had followed Leinster House by removing Chinese cameras for fear of data compromise. Byrne did the obligatory Chinese voice for that part of the gag.  If this had been necessary to make the joke funnier, then it could have been excused, but it wasn’t so it isn’t.  Byrne then used the ‘the Irish have their accents ridiculed more than any other nation’ argument which baited the more ignorant elements of his easily pleased audience. This felt like a strangely pointless addition, and more skilled comics could have introduced the reaction of the Chinese listeners by commenting on the temptation to do the offensive voice.  There was one lone voice jokingly (half-seriously) suggesting that this was racist.  Byrne used that as the opportunity to introduce the irritating ‘Tales of The Unexpected’ backed singalong – “Cunt, cunt, cunt you are a cunt, cunt, cunt…” to silence the dissent.

The best joke he told was credited to his cardiologist, and this (given his recent health problems) would seem to be the place to dig for comedy gold, but Byrne is all about energy and positivity so the typical Fringe naval-gazing (I saw a show once about a comic recovering from a serious car crash which was like being at a family do) is absent.