Trouble Denim: An anarchic comedian adjusts to chaotic life on the road

Trouble Denim

Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Dublin

★★★☆☆

An obvious question for Shane Daniel Byrne’s swirling new stand-up show is how a freewheeling comedian with a gift for bending rules adjusts to a gruelling career that already seems pretty lawless. “This is my difficult second album,” he jokes in Trouble Denim, twisting his face into the grimace of a nervous artist under pressure.

Following his immensely popular debut, But He’s Gay, Byrne explains that he’s taking a peer’s advice to create a show riffing on the milestones of his year, his first as a full-time comic. At its centre is a nerve-racking tour to Australia, from which he discovers he’s in a depression and launches into an attack on the Catholic Church to blame.

With Byrne’s punchlines the delivery is as important as the content – it often involves quicksilver impressions of smug Dublin suburbanites. (The voice of a Blackrock receptionist neighs with explanation: “I grew up around horses!”) There is a giddy tension, as his performance has a sense of lacking order. When explaining a demanding tour’s impact on his sleep, he pops off a half-baked improvised joke (“My schedule was out of whack. Like having sex!”) before staging an apology as a misdirection (“Sorry I put that in. I’m a virgin”).

The show doesn’t exactly exude the confidence of controlled chaos, as the links between monologues become tenuous. A skewering of a self-serious London comic’s advice (“Give them some vulnerability”) segues first to a comic family portrait and then to concerns about adulthood. He’s still taking charge of his destiny.