Travelling the country telling crowds about their lives and your own can give a stand-up comedian a peculiar perspective on life.

It is that which inspires Irish comedian Ed Byrne’s latest show Outside, Looking In.

The tour is on its way to Richmond, Dartford and Shepherd’s Bush and has already received rave reviews, including five stars in the Sunday Times.

Ed told us: “As a comedian, I feel sometimes like I am watching people live their lives and then reporting back. It is to do with feeling like an observer rather than a participant.”

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In the show, Ed discusses the unique life of a comedian, parenthood and how being an outsider gives you a unique outlook.

He said: “People do weird things and you want to know more about them. You can’t really judge people on the tiny bit you know about them.

“I talk about the weirdest thing I ever heard anyone say. I was in a comic book shop once and a bloke poked his head in the door and said ‘do you have anything where Superman plays the clarinet?’ It makes you imagine why and how it came to be that he asked that question.”

Sometimes on the internet, however, judgement is much easier to come by.

In these days where everyone is online, social media can be ostracizing, making us all observers looking in on other people’s lives. Social media is something that also pops up on Ed’s radar.

He said: “The thing about social media now particularly is that so many people when they go on it, they define themselves on it purely by the very things that you wouldn’t normally bring up in company.

“If I’m at my in-laws, I’m not going to talk about the fact I am an atheist. I know that they are Christians.

“I read the Independent and they read the Telegraph and there are just things you don’t want to chat about particularly.

“All those kind of things are the things where people (online) come in swinging and they just define themselves by that.

“There are a lot of people in their bio straightaway: ‘Conservative voting, libertarian, athiest’ and somebody else’s ‘right-wing blogger, Christian evangelist’.

“These are the labels that people put on themselves and everything they Tweet about is to do with that.

“It’s like ‘I’m here for a fight’. If we met under normal circumstances, we might even get on. We might just talk about how much we enjoyed The Revenant.

“Instead, you’re coming straight out with ‘feminism is poison’ and ‘white genocide is real’ and, I think ‘dude, you’re just an a******e’. You are just showing me the worst of you.”

The defining moment for Ed came after Caitlyn Jenner was featured on the cover of Time magazine after completing her transformation into a woman, and the reaction from a section of Twitter which started the hashtag #ImacallhimBruce.

He said: “Whatever your opinion is of transgenderism, to just go ‘I’ma call him Bruce’ just to be a d**k is just being a d**k. You don’t have to call her anything.

“If you met her, you wouldn’t go ‘I’m going to call you Bruce’. Nobody would be that much of a d**k in real life.”

Ed Byrne - Outside, Looking In is at Richmond Theatre on March 20, Dartford’s Orchard Theatre on April 19 and Shepherd’s Bush Empire on June 4. Go to atgtickets.com/Richmond, orchardtheatre.co.uk or ticketweb.co.uk

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