Dan Tiernan's Edinburgh fringe show Quartz and All sees the frenetic Mancunian turn to healing crystals in search of inner peace, but his standup remains as crude and self-loathing as ever.
A show about crystals and chaos
The comedian discusses his interest – his faith, supposedly – in healing crystals: rose quartz for calm, black tourmaline for grounding. Hard not to remark that neither seems to be doing its job well, as Tiernan is the least calm and grounded comedian imaginable.
You have to strap in for the ride at the Mancunian's shows, and Quartz and All is no less so than its predecessors. It opens with Tiernan seething with his usual self-loathing, and cracking a fantastic gag about getting glasses.
Self-loathing and crude gags
Now 30, he's still ambivalent, bordering on hostile, about his sexuality and appearance: the healing crystals are a last resort, he argues, because only magic can redeem a man as freakish and unlovable as he. Such arguments are his prerogative, and he brings his woebegone plight (so lonely, he's “getting on boats just so someone will wave at me”) to often hilarious, blood-vessel-busting life. But in the shadow of Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, that brand of internalised-bully comedy can be uneasy viewing.
The show is not the leap forward for Tiernan that its nomination as outstanding show at the Melbourne comedy festival suggests. His penchant for crude gags sometimes waylays him: see one gratuitous number about imagining himself as a Muslim.
Highlights and callbacks
But there remains a great deal to enjoy. The material on his newfound new age tendencies leads to some amusingly splenetic back-and-forth with the crowd, and culminates in a lurid and absurd sketch of a man tyrannised by the ritual of cleansing and then charging his crystals, more distant than ever from the inner peace he was promised.
From a comic who, when good, is very good, there's an excellent joke too about the butterfly effect and one of the all-time great callbacks, in which he finds himself imagining his own act performed by a hypothetical Chinese comedian. At such moments, Tiernan feels like a comic worth choosing to believe in. At Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, until 30 August.
