Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Rarely since Johnny Vegas was at his bitter, raging peak has a stand-up seemed as troublingly unhinged as Dan Tiernan. This show isn’t ‘like’ being trapped in a basement with a crazed lunatic yelling into your face – that’s precisely what it is.  

He has a lot of issues. He knows he looks a bit peculiar – and rattles off one hilarious analogy after another, quickly moving away from celebrity lookalikes into odd but uncannily precise descriptions that become running jokes across the hour. He has dyspraxia, too, adding new levels of violent unpredictability to his already aggressively nervy delivery. He’s angry at his stepfather, furious that his sex life isn’t what he wants it to be, incandescent that the world’s dealt him such a poor hand.

There’s some element of freak show here, a sort of ‘come see the wildman of Manchester rattling his cage’ danger to his intense delivery which Tiernan fully leans into. Though if he unleashes a vicious tongue-lashing on a member of the audience, he’ll salve it with a cheery ‘thanks for coming’. Phew, it is just a game, after all!

Jokes about himself and his fellow pupils at the special school he attended are definitely politically incorrect, but he’s got licence to tell them because it’s his story…. I think. This might be morally ambiguous territory, but he tears through it like a hurricane. 

He speaks of the jobs he couldn’t do – and the one he ended up doing, before comedy took over - and of living alone in a squalor of his own making. As with Vegas, there’s a vulnerability behind the ferocity: a loneliness, a refusal to come to terms with his mum’s new partner and an ill sister. 

This latter strand goes some way to calm the Tiernan beast, letting the manic momentum wind down to a more human pace. Although cynics would say it’s just the heartstring-tugging angle any Fringe debut could do with, he handles it with no mawkish sentimentally. Quite the opposite, in fact. And it’s something that’s been a big part of his life, so it would seem remiss not to mention it.

It would also be remiss not to mention the quality of Tiernan’s jokes… for while it’s the scary powerhouse performance you’ll remember, it’s backed by solid writing of proper gags that land all the harder for his tour-de-force delivery. It’s surely inconceivable that he won’t be in the running for best newcomer.

Review date: 9 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club