Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

‘What do you do when the guy who talks you out of killing yourself kills himself?’ asks Jamie Kilstein in what’s surely the most depressing comedy show this Fringe. If there’s another contender, I don’t want to witness it.

Kilstein’s life-saving friend was none other than Robin Williams, who made him feel ‘protected’ whenever things became too much, despite the troubles of his own that led him to take his life, 12 years ago this month.

Can’t Tie Knots, a reference to the noose Kilstein is trying to fashion as the lights come up, is definitely a show for which you should pay attention to the trigger warnings.

He quickly offers up some bleak jokes about suicide, suggesting that if you want to kill yourself, you must be cool and interesting, not like all those well-balanced squares in this audience. 

It’s rare, however, that the hour is even mordantly funny like that. Rather, we must endure a series of more-than-unfortunate events that batter his mental health. His cat dies. His relationship falls apart because he had an affair, while professionally he was crucified by an appearance on the podcast hosted by his one-time friend, Joe Rogan, where he got embroiled in a debate about rape jokes. It’s fair to say that the army of listeners did not appreciate the nuance of Kilstein’s stance against them. 

While being clobbered by the conservatives, Kilstein was also frustrated with the left for their habit of turning on the broadly progressive for not being pure enough in their wokeness. No wonder it's easier to turn to the simpler, and counter-intuitively less judgmental, political right, though it’s a temptation the comic resisted.

Nonetheless, at his nadir, Kilstein had something of a Damascene conversion to Christianity, joining a mega church in Texas, clearly looking for people who would accept him without judgment. Though of course they had plenty of judgment, they’re just good at hiding it in the sign-up process as they gleefully nab themselves an atheist convert.

While Kilstein is savagely honest as he lays out his raw humanity, the show is a relentless catalogue of low moments. More texture would most definitely be welcome as it’s easy to become inured to one grim scene after another, blurring into each other in the darkness. Our only respite is what the comic calls his ‘poems’, which are actually fierce rants against the state of the world and his life. Although these are still bleak, their passion is invigorating but too rarely deployed.

He gets a few walkouts on an already sparsely attended night, presumably because of the unremittingly wretched tone. Kilstein has got the performer's chops to hold the room, but it’s tested to the limits with this gruelling trauma dump.

Review date: 21 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot