This cramped space at the back of the Monkey Barrel is where Rob Kemp confined us all with his chainsaw-wielding Evil Dead/Elvis crossover in 2017 – and Dan Tiernan approaches that level of freaky intensity with his fringe debut, Going Under. No need for chainsaws when Tiernan wields his voice like a weapon, leaping from the stage to bellow this or that punchline in punters’ faces. That is the conceit: Tiernan is raging – as Johnny Vegas and Nick Helm did way back when – against his outsider status as a gay, dyspraxic loser, and “if anyone tries to leave, it’s a HATE CRIME!”.
OK, so the dial isn’t cranked up as far as it was with those anger-comedy forefathers. Tiernan, the 2022 BBC new comedy award winner, lets us know that he is a sweetie really. But much of the pleasure of the gig comes from his strategic volatility, from the shock treatment he may administer at any second with another furious outburst or queasy gag. Some of those are hard to love: the use of disability slurs, even granting Tiernan’s right to deploy them; the insults he directs at himself. More of them are thrillingly bleak, such as his act-out about anal sex, bone marrow and his sick sibling. “Get out of there! My sister needs my blood!”
This tale of his sibling’s leukaemia occupies the show’s final third, offsetting the misfit misanthropy while softening only a little into sentimentality. Before that, there is much roughhousing about the hand Tiernan has been dealt, as a pupil at a school for kids with special needs, a gay man who no one believes is gay, and a stepson of the loathed “Nick”, infuriating precisely because he is so nice. Tiernan is nice, too, for all the wicked fun he has sending up his dyspraxia (there is a choice visual gag with a notepad) and joking, rather neatly, about throwing himself in front of trains.
There will be bigger-hitting shows to come from Tiernan. But he makes a strong impression with this debut, a Mancunian wild-man now roaring, now leering at his pretend alienation from the world.
• At Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, until 27 August
• All our Edinburgh festival reviews
