After his barnstorming debut was nominated for best newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, Stomp is a giddily enjoyable follow-up from the unique Dan Tiernan.
At one point he muses about reclaiming the former slur “queer”. But far more crucial is the way by which the by turns bullish and vulnerable Mancunian wields his neurodiversity like a weapon. Putting his dyspraxia centre stage and vaguely suggesting other mental faculty impairments may have cast him as a victim. But after a fashion here he turns it to his advantage, if only because he can now elicit big laughs from his misfortunes.
Periodically roaring at the front rows like a bellicose golem, a recent diagnosis of gout affording him the distemper of a greedy but suffering animal, Tiernan’s chaos is nevertheless controlled, his aggression oddly endearing. Even when he’s miming crashing drink cans off his skull, which is a recurring physical quirk and formative act for his personality he would have you believe.
Bookended with a couple of neatly plotted visual gags, Stomp is more of an origin story than his debut but waggishly tongue-in-cheek in the way he goes about it. He returns to his sister’s cancer, the big emotional gut-punch of his debut, but touches on it more lightly and in passing this time, using it to undermine his own appeals for sympathy.
Little of his imposing but malfunctioning physical frame isn’t deployed for a laugh, from a barely perceptible dodgy eye deep-set beneath his low brow, which seems innocuous enough but which he amusingly uses to launch into extended, self-loathing commentary about the state of his career, to the immediate hilarity of his adolescent desire to become a magician, truly mining the incongruity of a dyspraxic person attempting to master sleight-of-hand.
There’s darkness throughout but it’s all given a cartoon edge, from childhood trauma to his excessive weed smoking habit and a preoccupation with suicide, in the semi-ironic death of the inventor of the escalator and Tiernan’s own recourse to miming autoerotic asphyxiation by wrapping the mic lead round his throat. Bizarrely, this stranglewanking becomes a recurrent punchline with the regularity and flavour of a favoured catchphrase.
All the while, there’s some deceptively elegant writing. It might rely on him playing dumb but there’s an absolute pearler of a routine about him getting confused about Pol Pot. Tiernan shrewdly keeps slightly hazy the full extent of his neurodiversity, dope consumption and after-effects of smashing cans off his bonce, allowing him to be intermittently idiotic and perceptive in a way that keeps his multi-layered observations and anecdotes unpredictable.
Tours until 22 March 2025 | Image: Contributed
The Reviews Hub Score
Multi-layered
