Interview: 'It's Me Laughing at Death, Essentially': Ed Byrne on His Show TRAGEDY PLUS TIME at SoHo Playhouse

There is a saying (though no one can prove exactly who said it) that “Humour is tragedy plus time.” Comedian Ed Byrne has made this quote the focus of his show, which recently played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and is now running at SoHo Playhouse in New York City. 

BroadwayWorld spoke with Ed about his run of Tragedy Plus Time at SoHo Playhouse. We discussed what it was like performing the show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the creative process for the show and what it has been like using a stand-up show to process grief. 

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For those unfamiliar with the show, can you tell us a bit about Tragedy Plus Time?

Yeah! It's a show that I did at the Edinburgh Fringe and now I'm touring around that examines the concept of humour equaling tragedy plus time, which is a notion that is quoted as Mark Twain, but there's actually no proof he ever said it - it's more likely to have been the American humorist Steve Allen, who first coined the phrase. And so I started off talking about a very minor tragedy that befell me, which is that I got my car broken into, and making jokes about that. The next night, I was making jokes about it on stage, because it was very minor. It wasn't funny at all at the time, but a day later, it was funny.

And then, going from that, I then talk about the fact that last year, my little brother died, which again, was not funny at all at the time. But now, a little over 18 months later, I managed to find the funny side of it, basically. But it's basically the story of the darkest joke I ever told, which was something I said to my mother about three days after my little brother's passing, a joke that didn't really land because the tragedy had been too big and the time elapsed just a little too short [Laughs]. But that's just a framework to hang the show on. But basically, it's me laughing at death, essentially.

What was the creative process like for the show?

Daunting to say the least. You normally start off where you do five minutes here, five minutes there at new material nights at comedy clubs, they're not so bad. But then when it's a little longer, you need to go to regular comedy clubs, as opposed to new material nights, And you start doing it in places where you're booked to do twenty minutes, half an hour, forty minutes, whatever it is. And that's a little trickier, because the audience on a Saturday night, they haven't shown up to hear you talk about your dead brother. So some of the more hard hitting bids have to be softened or dropped out even. And you still slightly feel like you're inflicting something on the audience that they didn't really sign up for when they came out on Saturday night to see the guy that's on the telly doing some jokes. 

But then, interestingly enough, when I moved on to the real preview work-in-progress stage where I hired a little black box theatre for an hour, it was surprisingly quick. I didn't realise quite how much material I had the first night out at the Museum of Comedy - I thought it was gonna come in at like forty minutes, and then have to just do twenty minutes of jokes at the end to give them their money's worth. But yeah, the whole thing came in at an hour, and the story was the story.

I did find it difficult to get through it the first few times without crying, but having told it a few times now, I do seem to be able to keep my emotions in check. I haven't really done a show like this before, where there's been quite the emotional weight or baggage attached to it. So it was a little harder to write than they normally are, from that point of view. And then it was easier to raise because the story was the story.

You mentioned that emotional baggage. How do you take care of yourself when you're performing the show? How do you ensure that you're not carrying that with you?

It's funny, a lot of people have asked me that, and it's very nice for people to be concerned! At the Fringe, I was staying with one of my best friends, a comedian called Glenn Wool, was with me and was also a good friend of Paul's, my brother. So that was very helpful from that perspective, just being around. The first couple of times I did the show, I was not coming off stage in the best mood. But the more I did it, the better I did begin to feel afterwards. I just enjoyed the fact that every night, however many people come to the show that hadn't heard of Paul Byrne, most of them go away and they know who he is. So I do enjoy that.

People come up to me after the show sometimes, and then want to tell you their story and tell you why the show resonated with them. That can be obviously quite gratifying. But that's another part of the whole thing that I didn't really take into consideration. But again, it's quite gratifying. I had a guy come up to me telling me that he'd lost his brother and how he didn't know what the show was going to be about, just came to see it. He’d lost his brother in early 2021 and he was there with his wife, and he just said, tears in his eyes, “I really feel like my wife now understands me more and what I've been through than she did before we came to the show.” And his wife looked at me and nodded, and it was like, “Okay, I'll take that!” 

What has it been like, hearing reactions like that?

Gratifying. I don't make arrangements to see people within 10 minutes of the show coming down, because I know there's a chance I won't be able to just make a hasty getaway. When somebody wants to tell you a story like that, you can't just go, “Yeah, okay. Well look, I'm meeting somebody, so can we wrap this up?” [Laughs]

What is it like performing comedy on stage versus on screen?

I prefer it on stage! All the on-screen stuff you do is really just to get people to come and see you live. As much as I'd like to pretend for any other reason, TV doesn't pay the way it used to. It's really just a shop window to remind people that you're still alive and still being funny.

I love being on stage. It’s my favourite thing because it's the one thing where I know no one else is telling me what to do. The audience, the feedback, informs your material, but no one else is editing or directing, you're not relying on other people to to play off anything. I just quite enjoy it. I can have days, I can have weeks, where the only time I feel I know what I'm doing is the hour or ninety minutes that I'm on stage. Everything else just feels like a hassle. The time I get on stage is the only time I know exactly what I'm doing.

Actually, when Paul died, I was on tour, and I took two weeks off around the time of his death. But after he died, I went back on tour. I would gig in between the death and the funeral, and it was the best I felt after two weeks of misery. Stepping out on the stage, it was ninety minutes I didn't think about it. So I find doing comedy on stage better than anything, as far as I'm concerned. I think BB King said,  “I do the shows for free. You pay me to travel,” and I think that's very true.

What do you hope audiences take away from Tragedy Plus Time?

I'm hoping that they find it funny! That is the main thing. I hope that people laugh. That is the point of it. But the message of the show . . . I talk about the fact that me and Paul had had a massive row, but that we had reconciled before he passed, and it was very important to me that we did. So I tell people like that because I came very close to not properly reconciling with him before he died. I'm very glad we did.

I would like people to come away from the show trying to mend any fences that are broken in their lives. There was a couple of times in Edinburgh where I was walking out with the audience, and I can hear them arguing. I heard this woman going, “I just don't think it's a fitting subject for comedy!” and the guy with her going, “But that's the point! That's the whole point! That's why it was amazing!” 

I've heard a number of conversations of people saying, “I'm going to find such and such,” “Yeah, such and such is really good for staying in touch and we shouldn't always rely on them to organise the meetings. We should organise our meetings,” and stuff like that. 

Ed Byrne: Tragedy Plus Time runs at SoHo Playhouse until 12 November 2023.

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