John Kearns @ Monkey Barrel Comedy
In new show Tilting at Windmills, John Kearns offers up a sublime, painful and hilarious vision of just how good stand-up can be
Last year, John Kearns was here preparing the show that would become Tilting at Windmills, in a raw and brilliant hour that offered oblique glimpses of a crumbling personal life. This year, he returns to the very same room with the show finished, ready to meet those personal circumstances head-on. He marks the end-date of a 12-year relationship almost exactly a year ago, the last time he was in this room, when he and his partner moved out of the house they shared with their five-year-old son.
Since then, Kearns has moved in with his parents, been figuring out how to live, and reading The Waste Land by TS Eliot. That poem’s preoccupation with decay and dissolution becomes a throughline, with recordings of Alec Guinness’ reading punctuating Kearns’ furious, tender and strident stand-up. Here’s what puts Kearns in a class of one: you’ll find plenty of Fringe performers who can do raw, or angry, or sad at the expense of the jokes. But few can hit all of those at the same time, and only Kearns can be uproariously funny while doing it.
Among Kearns’ many gifts is a sublime visual sense, with a series of tableaus – a Thameside view of the hospital he was born in and the place he started his career; his parent’s kitchen; a “frieze” of Kearns in the shower, his infant son on the toilet, and his mother kneeled, helping, before the son – building the show’s emotional core. And before the show’s done, Kearns will turn to a far more direct invective, all but abandoning the artifice of his iconic fake-teeth-and-tonsure with a raw appeal to the audience themselves.
It’d be easy to call these elements, by turns, “painterly” or “literary”, but either description would sell short the artform over which Kearns has such mastery. Tilting at Windmills is a sublime, painful and hilarious vision of just how good stand-up can be.
John Kearns: Tilting at Windmills, Monkey Barrel Comedy (MB3), until 30 Aug, 4.15pm, sold out, some pay-what-you-can tickets available on the door
John Kearns tours the UK in Autumn 2026, including Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 29 Sep; Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, 1 Oct; The Stand, Glasgow, 21 Oct