Edinburgh Fringe Comedy reviews: Tim Key | Tom Rosenthal | Vittorio Angelone | Dan Tiernan

Tim Key: Loganberry ★★★★☆

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 24 August

Tom Rosenthal: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I Am ★★★★☆

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 24 August

Vittorio Angelone: you can't Say Nothing any more ★★★★☆

Monkey Barrel (Venue 515) until 24 August

Dan Tiernan: All In ★★★★☆

Monkey Barrel (Venue 515) until 24 August

Tim Key stomps on stage in Cuban heels, making an explosive entrance that he struggles to dampen down. Surveying the audience with a sly smile, he doesn't need to be here he tells us. Now a bona fide independent movie star, still brought in to pep up numerous television comedies, he's “a big fish in a small pond”.

The endless self-mythologising of him, from the fond, mischievous ways he describes his parents' respective approach to cooking, evoking a whole network of relationships and personalities, to brief encounters with an even higher strata of celebrity in the form of Ben Stiller or Greg Rusedski, have always offered compelling snapshots of relatable experience, elevated by his poetic turn of phrase and bluff, borderline arrogant persona.

Tossing out a few lines of his idiosyncratic verse, roaming the room, engaging the crowd as he casually elicits opinions from them that he scarcely cares about, demanding they hold his lager, he's happy slumming it with the normals, master of all he surveys.

Except that he's not quite.

An enquiry from broadcaster Gabby Logan about appearing on her podcast, The Mid˙Point, has wounded him with the suggestion that he might be middle-aged and worse, peaking, his potential diminishing. Was he always just a journeyman, shuffling from one project to the next? Loudly, he dismisses Logan's approach as ridiculous. But he lets it fester, eating away at his projected confidence. This is a classic Key hour, hilarious in his braggadocio and ease of self-regard, deeply human when he shows flashes of vulnerability.

READ MORE: Tim Key returns to the Edinburgh Fringe with Loganberry, a 'skewed nod' to his breakthrough screen success

Another television star exploring outward perceptions of themselves is Tom Rosenthal, with the Plebs and Friday Night Dinner actor inviting the crowd to bawl out those shows' catchphrases at him, as they do in real life. Inspired by his love of The Arctic Monkeys' first two albums and subsequent disinterest in the band after that, he frets that he might also be a two-hit wonder, doomed to be “Pissface” forever to some.

Disclosing a recent diagnosis of neurodiversity, setting the record straight as to his nepo baby status and the extent of his Jewishness, piqued at not even being the most famous Tom Rosenthal for many people, he's flouncily entertaining but makes some solid points about pigeonholing, especially by fans, sympathising with Monkeys frontman Alex Turner as he struggles to be artistically credible.

There are sections that feel underdeveloped, such as the tale of his adolescent songwriting, mercifully nipped in the bud, and a bit about a popular tote bag, adding little to the narrative. But equally, there are daringly brilliant routines, as when he goes exceptionally dark about the death of his Friday Night Dinner co-star Paul Ritter and when he taunts and teases the young and old alike over generational perceptions of autism. There's also some blue-on-blue fire with which he takes aim at his management's fellow clients Daniel Radcliffe and David Baddiel, sympathetically, if mockingly, with the former, rather less so with the latter, Baddiel's agenda-led characterisation of his sports broadcaster father Jim crossing a line.

Another who's elevated pissing off others in the comedy industry, almost to an artform, is Vittorio Angelone. To be fair, the waggish Northern Irishman generally has some sound reasoning for his pops at fellow acts, critics and a television industry that he maintains overlooks him, even as he's just been signed as one of the young-ish faces of Channel 4's digital initiative A Comedy Thing.

A spigot of freer speech comedy or an online adjunct to proper television, like Richard Osman's House of Games, it certainly seems like a canny step for a mouthy but marginalised act who revels in packing out extra dates in big rooms without the benign blessing of mainstream media attention. Splashing out on a band and some theatrical skulduggery outside the venue, he burnishes his renegade credentials within. And it all dovetails neatly with his analysis of perceptions of Northern Ireland over the course of his lifetime, with The Troubles and his once-removed relationship to them afforded extra edge by the current prosecution of Kneecap and the situation in the Middle East.

Although Angelone opens with some taste-setting gags about racism and paedophiles, and shares some of the mental health issues that have dogged him since childhood, it's the effortless framing of the personal and political in his native Belfast that makes this, by some distance, his most ambitious and best show yet. Deceptively considered, given that he's flirting with the attentions of Gerry Adams' lawyers, it's generally and consistently very funny, both point-scoring and provocative in lengthy sections, constantly seeking a rise.

Well there you go Angelone, you thirsty bastard, four stars.

Someone who's been similarly insatiable but more successful in securing an Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination is Angelone's A Comedy Thing co-star Dan Tiernan. Channelling his bull-in-a-china-shop energy and delivery into a wild ride through his lifetime of narcotic use that is, by turns, candid and vulnerable, and, at other times, teeth-gnashing, gurning and manic, it's an appealingly even-handed summary of what drugs have done to and for him.

READ MORE: Here are the eight shortlisted nominees for Best Show at this year's Edinburgh Comedy Awards

Indeed, the comic credits his mad-fer-it summers at Glastonbury with shaping his Edinburgh shows, so you'd have to say that this year's brought just the right kind of epiphanies. Also opening up further on the outwardly laddish comic's struggles to express being gay, his internalised homophobia, and his belated efforts to form proper relationships, he affords insights into his neurodiversity as well and the moment of extreme mental collapse when everything just got too grim.

Tiernan doesn't flinch from recalling himself at rock bottom. But he does ultimately package it up in a rabble-rousing song and celebratory manner. In many ways a natural extension of his juggernaut earlier Fringe shows, the stakes and performance levels are nevertheless far higher in All In. And it remains to be seen if his mercurial talent can be harnessed for a mainstream audience while retaining his devilish spark.

JAY RICHARDSON

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