A blend of nerdy one-liner comic, and dark would-be edgelord, Ryan Cullen is a gifted writer whose initially dry, almost deadpan delivery suggests a Jimmy Carr-style clone automaton spewing technically clever but soulless paedophile gags. And the Irishman certainly has that in his locker, noting the exact number of punchlines into his set he is at one point. But he’s self-aware enough to acknowledge the recurring ‘serial killer vibe’ of some of his quips.

Endearingly too, he participates in a rare degree of crowd work for a comic of his lineage and goofily solves the issue of how to mix up the rat-a-tat formula of his set with a section in which he presents jokes he wrote while smoking weed, the random musical accompaniment chosen by his tech keeping it fresh for him too. Less successful is a bit when he gets an audience member to read some of his more outré lines while trying not to crack up, the best ones invariably causing them to dissolve into incomprehensible giggles, leaving everyone else clueless. Purely as a numbers game though, Ryan Cullen hits an awful lot more than he misses.

Reviewed at The Stand II as part of Edinburgh Fringe.