Ed Byrne is just back from an extended tour Down Under, and the trip seems to have done him the world of good. With his hair cropped short, the hard-gigging comic has, like a reverse Samson, rediscovered his strongest form.

His forte as always been observational comedy, with a talent for making a well-honed set sound like an off-the-cuff conversation – albeit one with many more gags that your average pub chat and enlivened by his animated, incredulous delivery and instinctive sense of pace and timing. As he tells his tales of a well-read comic on the road, he’s the perennial smartarse, always ready with an irrefutable comedown to any situation – at least in retrospect. It all adds to his charm as a friendly, sound bloke you want to spend time with.

Now, though, the well-told anecdotes and impish sense of mischief-making is reinforced with a passionate message – and it’s about the folly of religion. OK, so he’s not the first comic to ridicule the hypocrisies of the faithful, but he does it incredibly well. Using those well-honed conversational techniques, it comes across as smart observation, rather than bellicose preaching or cynically offensive. If Richard Dawkins ever needed an official gag-writer to the atheist cause, he could do a lot worse than calling on Byrne.