Dan Tiernan: Stomp review – can-smashing comic makes you wince and laugh

In these days of intensely autobiographical comedy, acts often rinse their identities, and empty the content of their hearts, in their very first show. Dan Tiernan made a splash last year with Going Under, which announced the Mancunian as gay, dyspraxic, immoderate in the extreme and with a sick sister to boot. So what is left for his sophomore offering? The answer is: gout. The 28-year-old has been diagnosed with a condition last fashionable in the age of George III, and his new show Stomp addresses his non-exemplary lifestyle. A love of sausages and black puddings is one thing. Drug use leading to psychosis? That’s quite another.
Happily, Tiernan has put his weed-smoking days behind him – but not before he stages a debate about the relative virtues of cannabis and babies, and addresses the effect that personalised online advertising had on his paranoia. As he did last year, Tiernan depicts himself as quite the wayward social misfit here, smashing cans against his forehead to amuse his pals, making mincemeat of your discomfort around dis- or different ability – and delighting that he appears more disabled than he is. His look, Tiernan tells us, suggests he is “really bad at maths … or really good at it”, which gives you the measure for both his gift for a cutting gag, and his compulsive – sometimes queasy – self-abuse.
As for the can-smashing – well, Tiernan is all about comedy that makes you wince as well as laugh. See the occasional feral roar at the audience, lest any of us have the temerity to feel settled. It’s a brilliant act, if not a show that packs any cumulative punch. Its pleasures are moment-to-moment, but they are many, and include an oblique gag about the assassination attempt on Trump, a choice routine about inventors alarmed to see their inventions put to incorrect use, and plenty of fine one-liners, like the one about his mum and dad’s divorce. It’s a set that consolidates Tiernan’s status as one of comedy’s most distinctive new voices, a loose unit whose bite is sharp and whose bark is even worse.