Scotland

Dan Rath: Help Me Please – Monkey Barrel Comedy

I descended a labyrinth of stairs into the sub-basement of Cabaret Voltaire to find Dan Rath. Red and blue LEDs light the way through a grungy, stone-arched room, while great lengths of aluminium ventilation snake overhead. It is a fascinating venue, dark, subterranean and atmospheric. No windows here, folks.

And, on this occasion, not really much of a window into Dan Rath either.

I had been looking forward to this. Rath’s I’m Not Doing Well, Folks is hilarious, a gloriously peculiar, rapid-fire excursion through a mind that seems permanently several steps ahead of its owner. Help Me Please, however, feels surprisingly tired.

Perhaps that is simply Rath’s demeanour, but tonight the delivery seems slower, the jokes flatter and the whole thing rather scattergun. There are still flashes of the absurdity that makes him such an interesting comedian. A routine about genies produces perhaps the biggest laugh of the evening. By the time you get to your second wish, Rath suggests, your dick is already too large to allow you to fly. Ridiculous, unexpected and very funny.

Then, as you do, we move on to autism. How, Rath wonders, do you diagnose autism in Denmark? Greta Thunberg enters proceedings. Then we are off to Italy to consider how ADHD might be diagnosed there. There is something funny in all of this, certainly, but the ideas seem to arrive and disappear before they have quite developed into anything substantial.

At one point Rath asks how people have heard of the show. Someone in the front row announces that Elon Musk has apparently been pushing it on X. This appears to be news to Rath, and it was certainly news to me. Perhaps somewhere in the vast and peculiar X universe Musk really is a secret Dan Rath fan. Stranger things have happened.

The frustrating thing is that Musk’s fascination would not surprise me, I know how funny and off-the-wall Rath can be. There are enough glimpses here of that wonderfully skewed comic brain to remind me why I’m Not Doing Well, Folks worked so well.

But tonight the energy never quite arrives. Deep beneath Edinburgh, in this wonderfully grungy, windowless room, I kept waiting for Rath to open one.

Playing until 30th August, https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/2026DANRATH

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 13th August 2026

North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating: