Fringe comedy reviews: Dan Tiernan | Tom Cashman | Stephen Catling | Dee Allum | Thermos Museum Books + more

Dan Tiernan: Quartz and All | Jack Hauxwell

Dan Tiernan: Quartz and All ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Monkey Barrel 1 at Monkey Barrel Comedy (Venue 515) until 30 August

Before the show begins the audience is blasted with high octane dance music, as a video plays on the ancient walls of the Monkey Barrel venue. It’s Dan Tiernan, wearing a bizarre ethnic outfit, flashing his stomach, frolicking next to some kind of ruined castle and picking up rocks from the ground.

Eventually the old walls of the Monkey Barrel venue start merging with the ruins of the castle – the frenetic dance music, the trippy looping video. There’s a sensory overload which becomes almost hallucinogenic. (Maybe that was just me.) Finally, the real Tiernan, dressed in smart black and white street wear, leaps out from the side of the stage and we’re off, straight into a brilliantly off-the-wall stream of consciousness.

Dan Tiernan is alarmingly intense, yelling, gurning, howling in the faces of the crowd. The level of energy never lets up – and all you can do is laugh equally loudly to dispel the tension. The energy is deliberately, big, loud and scary but Tieran’s subject matter is his own vulnerability and search for meaning. There’s a back to nature theme, a yearning to step away from the machines and tune into the outside world, particularly the rocks and stones.

There’s something about the way he bellows all this soul-searching stuff that really works. Tiernan overpowers his audience into helpless laughter, which runs around the room in delighted waves.

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He scores a serendipitous bit of crowd work, when a girl in the audience claims to have sold him a crystal in Covent Garden mystery shop. Incredibly, another person in the crowd turns out to be an expert on ADHD. Despite the temptation to get an instant medical evaluation and to chat about his favourite crystals, Tiernan visibly restrains himself and masterfully steers his show back on course towards his powerful and delightfully magical surprise ending.

He’s hilarious, inventive and original, and beneath his outrageous posturing, there are some big, intelligent and beautiful ideas. Although he paints himself as a tortured soul, he seems to be having a whole heap of fun. I had a whole heap of fun as well. Claire Smith

Tom Cashman: NPC (Nearly Proficient Comedian) ★ ★ ★ ★

Monkey Barrel Comedy (Venue 515) until 30 August

Famous in his native Australia for his starring role in Taskmaster (he’s the Antipodean Alex Horne), the title of Tom Cashman’s show should be reported to Trading Standards such is its level of inaccuracy. In fact, that’s exactly the kind of thing the comedian would probably do, such is his dedication to knowingly tortuous nit-picking.

The theme of the hour is self-confidence and how it fluctuates throughout our lives – often within a matter of hours. Somewhat unusually for a Fringe show, barely anything feels shoehorned in as the material segues together beautifully making for an hour that passes with indecent haste.

Cashman’s stock-in-trade is hilariously nerdy and tortured dissections of the smallest of subjects – from haircut etiquette and the true nationality of Russell Crowe (it’s complicated), to bird idioms and the difference between acronyms and initialisms (every day’s a school day).

These comedic rabbit holes are explored in depth with the help of a powerpoint presentation packed with graphs, graphics, coding and Excel formulae. This is clever stuff delivered with precision, about a world where questioning who invented the flat white coffee somehow leads to the attempted sabotage of an energy company merger and an awkward appearance on one of New Zealand’s biggest television show.

It all culminates in a genuinely jaw-dropping segment more than 20 years in the making about the unwanted attention he received from a man when he was 16. It’s hard to care that it’s the only section that seems out of place in the set.

A final story about the indignities suffered on a gym visit is preceded by the best bucket speech you’re likely to hear in Edinburgh this year – accompanied, of course, by the requisite flowchart – before a sly visual correction of the title as the audience exits. Maybe Trading Standards don’t have to be involved after all. David Hepburn

Stephen Catling : Clown Fish Out of Water ★ ★ ★

Hoots @ Potterrow (Venue 243) until 31 August

If you like your comedy neat and tidy, this is not the show for you. Here there are several badly fitted rubber masks – masks are significant in autism, Catling tells us - plus dodgy overalls and indiscriminate use of shaving foam. Fans of the octopus are in for a bit for a treat, however Disney comes in for a pasting, but why not?

Stephen is, he tells us, autistic, and is way too honest in job interviews and rather pines for the days when it was OK to like Kevin Spacey. We enthusiastically boo Oasis and I, for one, am impressed at the ingenuity shown in his creation of the female glory hole.

Although he warns us frequently that he is prone to information dumping, I never feel dumped upon, just informed and interested. We share a bag of greens, a lettuce does a striptease unto death and we examine, with the young guy in front of me, why we cannot cure the Male Loneliness Epidemic with AI. Catling is moreishly odd, wild of hair, bushy of beard and intense in manner, but it makes for a gripping show. Kate Copstick

Dee Allum: Ramdeuter ★ ★ ★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

“Der Raumdeuter” is the nickname of German midfielder Thomas Müller. Translated as “interpreter of space”, it refers to his mastery of the “in-between” areas of the pitch, and it’s a fun metaphor for Dee Allum as she tells us about where she is in her transitioning journey.

Joking (not joking) that she’s “not like other girls”, Allum talks with careful wit and warmth about the effect of hormone treatment on her changing body, and shares how difficult it is to decide whether or not – and indeed how – to take the life-changing step of having bottom surgery.

Along the way, she takes logical aim at the International Olympic Committee for banning trans women from competing in female events. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, the organisation claims there is no place for politics in the Olympics; meanwhile, every single thing trans people do is seen as being political.

We also get some insight into her family life, highlights including the lighter side of explaining being trans to her right-wing grandmother who has dementia.

Playful, cheeky and instinctively funny, Allum highlights the boyish aspects of her character, naturally weaving a few football analogues into this fun hour that honours and celebrates the special nature of that in-between space. The world is indeed richer for having people like Dee Allum in it. Ashley Davies

READ MORE: My Festival: Deborah Frances-White

Thermos Museum Books ★ ★ ★

Canon's Gait (Venue 78) until 30 August

Do not worry if you are not a fan of either museums or thermos flasks – you will find neither here. It helps to have done some background reading on the life, career and grisly death of Frank Simpson. Luckily the show's flyers are magazines which tell you all you need to know.

Line drawings and spindly writing here tell the continuing tale, with the aid of Neil Davidson and we are all drawn – despite Neil's aversion to sequels and the problem of the protagonist being dead – into his gently gripping tale of a broken marriage, the accused wife, ructions in the television repair community and the tantalising prospect of ‘Frank Simpson 3’. Davidson's delivery is perfectly pitched, mild-mannered, and deadpan, and it is a lovely thing to watch.

This is someone with total confidence in his material and the perfect performance of it. Every so often, like a kind of a retro Easter Egg, we get a stupidly funny, laugh out loud joke or illustration. The show operates on different levels, like a Viennetta of fun. But more special. Kate Copstick

Katie Norris: Mother Succubus ★ ★ ★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

A succubus is a mythical female demon that sucks the life out of men. The deliciously eccentric Katie Norris says she has been called one many times. Never by a woman, funnily enough.

Stuffed crow by her side, she plays with the idea of no longer giving a toss about what men think. Having had 143 first dates at her local pub, she paints an often surreal picture of a world in which you start becoming invisible to society. The characters she conjures – such as women who go wild swimming to forget their problems – are wildly entertaining and acutely observed.

There are some other glorious moments in Mother Succubus: a jaw-dropping story about the grisly reason for her car making a weird noise feels like it couldn’t come from anyone else’s life. A bafflingly inappropriate year-nine casting and inappropriate comments made to her while she was a young waitress lead us briefly into darker territory, with the cultural significance of Eurotrash uniting those of us of a certain age in the audience.

Norris treats us to a handful of her trademark songs, demonstrating her remarkable musical talents, and has one particularly good refrain that it’ll be hard not to borrow when one’s judgment is called into question. Early on in the show Norris declares that men are intimidated by her but, if I had been one of the Americans sitting near the front on the night I saw her, I would be too.

There’s a delicate balance between being a big character in control of one’s audience and risking people feeling belittled. One gets the impression that a pleasant development in Norris’s personal life took this show into unexpected territory. The result is a surprising change of pace that doesn’t feel entirely worked through, but it’s still very entertaining. Ashley Davies

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