“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”
– Henry Thoreau
There is a type of mild, diffident white man of a certain age. Divorced, perhaps. Life not going quite how he imagined. Inside is a gnawing feeling of emptiness. Surely, there was supposed to be more to life than this?
Some go mad, or get really into trains. Thoreau went to live in the woods.
Professor Jamie Byrne, meanwhile, is dedicating his life to bringing cigarettes back to the very centre of British culture.
Shuffling onto the stage in nondescript suit and preposterously lengthy tie, Byrne (actual person) has, with Professor Byrne (comedy character), created a genuine oddball. He is a meek, deluded everyman – specifically, in this case, manifested as a shit lecturer at a struggling former Polytechnic (he claims to represent the University of Luton airport).
With understated verbal tics, a muted passion, and incomprehension at anyone finding this funny, Bryne’s game is slideshow comedy. We are taught a palpably untrue history of smoking, and our audience relaxes into the silly images of cave painting animals, ancient Egyptians, and biblical characters all enjoying a relaxing drag of sweet, sweet tobacco.
Powerpoint stand-up is a tricky beast. The rhythm of the material can easily get bejiggered by technical problems, and the timing between saying funny things and having funny things happen on the screen is a difficult thing to master. Byrne leans into the format’s inherent naffness, with deliberate formatting oopsies and obviously doctored photography. Emails hinting at the extent of the character’s descent into madness “accidentally” pop up on screen.
In a show directed by Sam Eley, he of notorious papier-mâché-headed comic monster Basil Crumbwick, Byrne’s character is grotesque but grounded, hence the confusion of some in the audience as to whether all this is what the comedian actually believes.
This reviewer would like to see Byrne lean into the desperation and the failure even more. Little details – like Byrne’s lecturer driving himself to the point of financial destitution through putting up fake pro-smoking plaques all over London – are brilliantly specific, and therefore hilarious, examples of his madness, and the show needs more of them.
There’s almost a Basil Fawlty waiting to burst out here, but Professor Byrne never quite reaches his attacking-a-car-with-a-branch moment, or a much more explicit reckoning with the weirdness of his worldview, despite his knowingly tragic (and very mean) portrayal of his nemesis, a doctor highlighting the link between smoking and cancer.
Instead, the sub-Farage petit-dictator tendencies of the character are hinted at in the casual misogyny (a Victorian family tree with women labelled things like, “some bint”), and the entertainingly incoherent vision of some future Britain healed by smoking – he’s unsure what it’ll look like, exactly, but he knows it’ll involve parquet flooring.
Overall, though, Byrne is a brilliant comedy creation: a deluded, Partrigean soul, tilting at windmills like a post-enlightenment Don Quixote.
The sinister undercurrent, present throughout, comes from the fear that the Byrnes of this world might, ultimately, be triumphant.
Reviewed on 5th May
