Ed Byrne is a career comedian with over thirty years’ experience. He’s travelled the world with festival circuits and is recognisable from his many appearances as a regular on UK panel shows. Byrne’s current show Tragedy Plus Time draws from the saying attributed to Mark Twain that “humour is tragedy plus time” and it leans heavily into this theme. The show’s overall narrative is based on the recent death of his younger brother, which coincidently leads him to say the joke he claims (and later demonstrates) as the darkest joke he’s ever said. The show and performance are self-aware and deconstruct themselves, as well as the approaches to comedy, in a rapid-fire manner. The performance is controlled yet high energy, which allows for the comedy to sit firmly in dark humour territory while presenting itself as upbeat and much lighter than a lot of the framing implies. The general approach to the show involves a lot of sign posting within the individual tales and quicker jokes. Almost every joke is referred back to and the heavier themes are stripped away so much that the seriousness they represent becomes an afterthought. Tragedy Plus Time is a clever approach to dark humour. The show is loaded with so many jokes and incorporates so many subtle changes between comedic styles that there is almost guaranteed to be at least one joke that would work for everyone. The complete self-awareness on show grants a strong connection with the audience as the personal faults or missed opportunities are part of the humanisation of Byrne as a stage performer and character. These moments of fault are intertwined and reclaimed throughout the show with no opportunity for a joke or Byrne centring himself in a position of authority are missed. By the time the show reaches the darkest joke Byrne ever said there was full context and framing for it to hit in a variety of funny ways without losing the full depth of the moment in which the joke occurred. Tragedy Plus Time is an incredible stand-up performance running through to the end of Fringe at Gluttony.