Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Over the past three years, Dan Tiernan has built a formidable reputation for highly intense, unhinged performances built on intimidation and perceived unpredictability. And he starts this Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated hour  in typically fierce style, unleashing both barrels as a pumping dance soundtrack fades. 

He wears the fact that he’s ‘only had the one psychotic episode’ – as discussed in his last show – as a badge of pride.  However, when he says that he’s better now, the statement remains loaded with such foreboding that few would probably believe him.

Yet despite the comic coming across as a ball of seething, coiled-up anger, his hour is based on the surprising revelation that he genuinely believes in the magic healing power of crystals, now proudly owning 30 of them.

It speaks to the fact that assumptions people make about him are often not true – something he’s certainly observed as a gay man with none of the stereotypical indicators of queerness. 

But as he gradually moves down through the gears – including a brilliant callback involving a Chinese comedian pinching his material – he lowers the heat to a simmer. He becomes atypically subdued to expose the vulnerability behind the fury, especially his abject loneliness. Must be the calming effect of the rose quartz.

He holds us rapt with restraint as he does with fury – though he breaks the spell to go into crowd work, not always fruitfully. Audiences at awards-nominated shows can be weird after the news comes out, and Tiernan seems determined to ensure that’s the case tonight with some awkward interactions. This is the weakest part of tonight’s show – though I’ve seen enough Tiernan performances to know that’s an anomaly – and the underlying narrative is strong enough to withstand it. 

And he does eventually find what he seeks, the one thing worse than a non-believer: a dilettante crystal-head who doesn’t know the difference between cleaning and charging the minerals. Idiot. Thus he can burst into a new rant and ramp up the passion again.

His belief in the crystals is clearly a leap of faith – but that could be enough, and, he argues, no more odd than the superstitions almost everyone subscribes to. And that he thinks they might work for him just demonstrates his desperation to find happiness. So what if there’s no logic to it? 

With its leaps from the profound to the crude, the crazed to the thoughtful and the menacing to the wounded, it’s apt that a show about crystals is multifaceted.

Review date: 31 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club