Edward Cathal "Ed" Byrne (born 16 April 1972 in Swords, Ireland) is an Irish stand-up comedian famous in the UK and Ireland. Commonly seen on Mock the Week.
This comedian provides examples of:
- Age-Inappropriate Dress: Has a routine about an 11-year-old girl wearing a track suit with "Gorgeous" written across the arse.
- Plus when speaking to the father he ends with a Bait-and-Switch:"It's got 'Gorgeous' written across the arse of it. Is that not a bit... you know..." and he says, "Well, that's the fashion." And I'm like, "Yeah, but she's a fucking minger."
- However, he has no objection to a (hypothetical) four-year-old in a pinstriped suit and a bowler hat.Because that would be adorable.
- Plus when speaking to the father he ends with a Bait-and-Switch:
- The Alcoholic: After being warned by something his father read in a magazine that giving up drinking for a month may be a sign of alcoholism."So I said, thanks for the heads up there dad. I'm never giving up drink again! I don't want people thinking I'm an alcoholic."
- Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: "Cooking While Pissed."When the smoke alarm goes off, it's done!
- Bait-and-Switch: A common style of joke for him, usually of the ironically sexist variety.
- Berserk Button:
- After trying endlessly to try and get a joke in in the final part of a Mock The Week episode, Ed yells out "Am I invisible in this fucking jacket?!", before eventually stealing the microphone.
- Wedding planners.
- Black Comedy:
- "I can't think what specific makeup tips you need to be a wife or girlfriend of a footballer, other than maybe this foundation covers up a black eye."
- Also, he claims to enjoy going to the supermarket, filling a cart with booze and baby supplies, then pretending not to have enough money for everything and seeing how the store employees react.
- Brick Joke: All the time.
- Bromance: With Dara Ó Briain, especially when he's on Mock the Week:Dara, if loving you was illegal, how long would they have to sentence me for?
- City Shout Outs: Subverted during his Alanis Morissette segment.I did a gig a while back in High Wycombe. Which is a lovely place, if there's anybody watching. But it's not if there's nobody.
- Comeback Tomorrow: Has a routine about thinking of a comeback days, weeks, or even years after the conversation ends, and sometimes pretends to the audience that his reaction happened on the spot.
- Deconstruction: Of a T-shirt reading "I Love Pussy Like a Fat Girl Love Cake."You put cake in front of a fat girl, she's at least going to know what to do with it. [...] If that's the relationship you, as a 13-year-old boy, have with pussy—you have issues you have not addressed, my young friend. Like if sometimes you'll want pussy, but you'll deny yourself pussy... or if now and again, you'll have pussy and then feel really bad about yourself afterwards... or if sometimes, occasionally, you might even deliberately have too much pussy, in order to punish yourself because of complex issues to do with your self-esteem... If that's how you, as a 13-year-old boy, feel about pussy, you're fucking gay!
- Digital Piracy Is Evil: On the annoying DVD piracy warning, "oh this music is so funky, it makes me want to obey the law"
- Does Not Like Men: He has respect for feminists, but man-haters he can't tolerate. He imagines women who died for the cause are looking down from heaven saying "you ungrateful bitch"
- Fantastic Slurs: Interplanetary trash talk.
- Goth: He is not afraid of goths, and thinks that getting stared down by one is quite hilarious."Does my vampiric countenance not chill you to your bones???" "Fucking no."
- Grammar Nazi:
- On Michael Jackson's "Thriller": "How come nobody had the balls to go, 'Michael, don't mean to step on your creative vision here or anything, but do you not think what you're going for here is really more of a horror than a thriller? It's hardly a fucking whodunnit, is it? Columbo doesn't come in at the end and go, 'It was the zombies.'"
- His whole rant about the 13-year-old boy with a t-shirt saying "I Love Pussy Like a Fat Girl Love Cake," which is a combination of this and philosophizing about the legitimacy of the statement itself.
- Incredibly Lame Pun: A few.Whilst at college I experimented with drugs. I did it in snow, I did it in sleet, but I did not...in hail.Enjoy your animal-shaped biscuits. Do not eat if seal is broken. (cue Happy Dance)People say to me, 'How do you find the thyme?' I say, 'It's there, next to the sage!'When a hairpiece gets possessed by the devil, there will be Hell Toupee.
- Jock Dad, Nerd Son: Dad was a sheet metal worker, Ed not so much.
- Large Ham: Usually not, but when he does act this way, he goes all-out. "Let's Decorate the Shit Out of This House"
on Mock the Week, eventually followed by the "Cooking While Pissed" Running Gag, are beloved for this reason. - Nerdgasm: "They've spent all this money on a documentary about space. I'm going to cum in my pants."
- Nerds Are Virgins: "I used to play Dungeons and Dragons for a while until I discovered what women smelled like."
- Shout-Out: Known to wear t-shirts of things he likes such as Pearl Jam and BioShock.
- Trekkie
- Upper-Class Equestrian: Simultaneously played straight and inverted in a routine from Different Class - the richest people in Ireland own horses as a status symbol, but the lower classes include the Irish Travellers who also own horses to move their caravans. So if you're Irish and don't own a horse, there's a good chance that you're middle class.
