Comedy Festival 2018: Jason Byrne reliably hilarious in The Man With Three Brains ★★★★

PUNTERS beware as long-time festival favourite Jason Byrne runs riot with his supreme mastery of audience improv in a hugely entertaining, freewheeling show of absurd nostalgia.

A FEW words of warning for those thinking of going to see Irish comedian Jason Byrne at this year’s festival. Point one: don’t be late. Point two: maybe leave the teenagers at home. And point three: don’t be late with teenagers in tow.

One such family (quite willingly and happily, it must be said) fell foul of point three and found their 15-year-old son dancing like a maniac on stage and their 13-year-old daughter singled out in the crowd as the veteran Irish comedian went to town in his magnificently foulmouthed and anarchic fashion to kick off his new show The Man With Three Brains.

Jason Byrne in The Man With Three Brains.

Audience participation has always been an integral element for regular fixture Byrne, who has been one of the most reliably hilarious acts of the festival for well over a decade, and not many do it better.

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Indeed, the first 10 minutes of the show are simply joyously spontaneous nonsense as he banters back and forth with the punters, singling out the tardy and their excuses, making fun of accents and suburbs and dragging the unsuspecting up on stage to become part of the freewheeling shenanigans.

Byrne is such a master of the art of improvised audience participation that you wonder how the show proper could ever top it, but his scripted material — with detours aplenty — is just as strong.

Foremost in his mind are some of the absurdities of soft modern life, from bottled water, to mollycoddled Millennials who’ll never leave the family home and pampered pooches, contrasted with the old-school joys of dangerous fireworks and cereal toys.

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Byrne gets some of his biggest laughs with some racy material about the disappointing realities of married sex and a hilariously wrong story about self-pleasure in hotel room, with sound effects and body language that will be burned in the brain for some time to come.

And to bring it all home, there’s a Coldplay inspired finale (last year’s show also featured the band’s music — what IS it about him and Chris Martin?), complete with mobile phone lights that leaves the audience members positively buzzing, if a little baffled about what they just experienced.

I still don’t have a clue why the show is called The Man With Three Brains — it seems entirely tangential to anything in it — but I’d give a whole lot to live in just one of them for a day.

Jason Byrne, The Man With Three Brains

Forum Theatre Downstairs, 154 Flinders St, until April 22.

comedyfestival.com.au