Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

After some ill-advised high-concept shows, including a 2019 offering, which she performed entirely in a sweaty T-Rex outfit, Harriet Dyer has adopted a no-whistles-and-bells approach for her latest show. Her neurodiversity is the only thing she’s wearing for comic effect this time around.

The Cornish stand-up has turned the fact that her brain doesn’t work like most others into a comic power. Her set – as digressionary as its title suggests – is jam-packed with incidents when she acted in a peculiar manner, stories that now she relates with playful self-deprecation, and more pride in being different than shame in being weird.

To crib a review from her primary school teacher, she’s ‘quite a chatter,’ speaking 19 to the dozen and often losing her place as she spins excitedly off into new tangents or breaking off for snippets of bonkers ideas she suggests she’s ‘workshopping’. Which is a posh word for talking nonsense. 

Anything in the room can be a distraction. 'Can you smell meat?’ she inquires at one point. Though actually she mis-speaks it as: ‘Can you hear meat?’ Which is probably the most Harriet Dyer sentence you could imagine.

She shares a fast-moving stream of jokes and anecdotes with very little thread, bouncing around between, say,  infrequent Cornish buses, a malfunctioning generator at an old workplace, or bad eBay experiences. Her bonkers mum is a rich source of material, even though it’s very apparent the apple has not fallen far from the loopy tree.

As an agent of chaos, Dyer larks around in situations that should be no place for jokes and sets up self-destructive pranks, and delights in sharing her exploits, sprinkled with silly puns.

Past traumatic experience is mentioned, but not exploited for emotive pull but instead used for a story about her being so short of people to talk to about it that she would hang around in women’s toilets, that most supportive of environments. While a terrifying mental health incident is played only as an example of stupidity.

Thanks to meds she says she’s ‘not as mental as I used to be’ – which is a concerning thought. But her current brand of bananas is uniquely, off-the-wall funny, genuinely unpredictable and delivered in an invigorating blast of pure nervous energy. 

Review date: 29 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Cabaret Voltaire)