Dan Tiernan Quartz and All Review: Furious but Short of a Leap
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- Dan Tiernan's fringe show Quartz and All is built around his supposed faith in healing crystals — rose quartz for calm, black tourmaline for grounding — with the reviewer noting the irony that the "least calm and grounded comedian imaginable" is preaching their virtues.
- The show was nominated for outstanding show at the Melbourne comedy festival, but the review judges it "not the leap forward for Tiernan" that nomination suggests.
- Tiernan, now 30, frames the crystals as a last resort because "only magic can redeem a man as freakish and unlovable as he," and mines that self-lacerating posture for material including a line about being so lonely he's "getting on boats just so someone will wave at me."
- The review places the show in the shadow of Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, arguing this "brand of internalised-bully comedy" can make for "uneasy viewing" in that lineage.
- The reviewer singles out a butterfly-effect joke, a crowd-work riff on new-age cleansing rituals, and "one of the all-time great callbacks," in which Tiernan imagines his own act performed by a hypothetical Chinese comedian, as the show's high points.
- The review flags one "gratuitous" gag — Tiernan imagining himself as a Muslim — as the kind of crude material that "waylays" an otherwise promising hour.
Why it matters: Tiernan's Melbourne outstanding-show nomination framed *Quartz and All* as a breakthrough, but the review pulls that back: strong crowd work and callbacks don't offset crude gags and an internalised-bully-comedy mode that reads uneasily post-Gadsby. For a fringe comic, the gap between award buzz and a mixed verdict is where a rising reputation can stall rather than break through.
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