Ed Byrne triumphantly makes light of darkness at Comedy Festival [Video]

One minute later, Ed Byrne has fired 11 jokes. Every one of them has transformed the ordinarily sterile Beckett Theatre (a theatre inside the wider Malthouse Theatre site) into a rooster cage having a feather storm of its own making.

This one in the next seat is cackling himself into a puddle of his own snorty blubber. Someone needs to put him out of his misery with a feather, because Ed Byrne can’t stop doing these freaking jokes and… oh boy… thy neighbour is soon regressing into a positive agony, laughing at how incensed Ed Byrne is about the idea that Irish people sneak off without saying goodbye.

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But a quick rewind. Right before the show, the Beckett Theatre was blasting the froggy-throated shamanism of Pearl Jam’s Given to Fly. Not insignificant, we will learn. Byrne and his …