Review: Ed Byrne at Ipswich Regent, March 3

“THESE jokes worked in Tunbridge Wells, so if you don’t like them it’s your fault,” warned Ed Byrne while warming up the audience for his own warm-up act - strangely not the most surreal thing that happened that night.

That honour goes to a story involving Bruce Willis, but we’ll get to that later.

Byrne’s latest show was a tour de force, an outpouring of every petty peeve that’s bugged him over the last year or so.

Be it the pitfalls of dating - especially buying your partner flowers or introducing them to your mates - and inappropriate child clothing to chip and pin and why alcohol and working on the CERN Hadron Collider don’t mix nothing escaped his curmudgeonly charming wit.

He tackled the big stuff too, such as being a new dad, the problem with agnostics and his cat’s worryingly escalating obsession with catching impressively large wildlife.

Despite some excessive heckling from a bawdy bunch, fellow Irishman Karl Spain more than earned his support slot.

His description of Limerick’s first Gay Pride march and a traumatic bath time experience as a youngster had the audience howling; as did his attempt at giving relationship advice to a long-term engaged couple in the front row.

Oh yes, Willis.

Too good to be true, yet too weird to be a lie, an audience member’s tale of how the action star got his mum arrested while on a family day-trip to a new Heathrow airport terminal nearly upstaged Byrne.

A fantastic night out.

WAYNE SAVAGE