Dan Tiernan returns to the Fringe with his tricky second hour, Stomp, once more terrorising audiences with his dark and forthright humour and the occasional twisted punchline.
Within this hour, Tiernan catches us up on his year through a series of anecdotes starting with his gout diagnosis and goes from there, taking us on a number of winding observations and unexpected tangents in a rather personal hour that never stops on one point or punchline too long before taking off further down the rabbit hole. His initial skit eases us into the rest of the material, in that it is by far the tamest part of the show. The hour ends with a whimper in what is a strong start, kind of tapers off. There’s an uneven rhythm to the show, as Tiernan’s pace picks up until the show itself becomes quite frantic as he constantly tries to get just one more laugh out of his audience.
“The laughs come quickly”
In Stomp, Tiernan centers himself, mostly through deprecatory humour, and it is often by saying the most innocuous thing that he gets the biggest pay-off for his punchline. He constantly builds on the material, linking it back, pushing an idea and our comfort to the brink, building this bubble of laughter until.
Tiernan has a tendency to equate volume with a punchline, which eventually loses its effectiveness and novelty in the frequent repetition of this technique. And it’s mostly used when Tiernan wants to get a better laugh than he thinks the joke deserves or to pick up the energy. Point is, it’s not needed as often as it is utilised and it’s oppressively too loud for the space. He does this to play to the crowd, but as a bit or a gag, it runs too long. He could use the time spent on screaming at people on delivering material, which is funny, clever and solid and of which we would happily hear more, especially if the only other option is being screamed at. It almost comes from a lack of faith and confidence in his own abilities as a comic, but his jokes don’t need anything else to be funny, and in fact through this over-compensation on Tiernan’s part, it detracts from the existing comedy of his material.
This is a solid hour of material where the laughs come quickly as Tiernan revels in shocking us into laughter, creating incisive and clever punchlines at every point of the hour.
By Katerina Partolina Schwartz
Photo Credit: Matt Crockett
Pepper & Salt 
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