Mark Daniels: That's Terrifying. Can We Brunch Now? @ Presuming Ed's

Mark Daniels delivers queer comedy with genuine texture. That’s Terrifying, Can We Brunch Now? is sharp, warm, emotionally intelligent stand-up that understands queer life beyond easy stereotypes. Daniels is camp, but in the purest sense, camp as instinct rather than performance, camp as bloodline rather than affectation.

The show’s central premise is deceptively simple: Daniels is, by his own admission, in the middle of a creeping midlife crisis, though one constantly interrupted by two equally pressing concerns; a limited budget and an obsession with buying aggressively loud, gloriously gaudy jackets. Those jackets become both visual gag and structural device. Each new item of outerwear unlocks another chain of stories, anxieties and punchlines, allowing the material to jump elegantly between topics while still remaining tethered to a single running theme. It is a surprisingly clever framework for a show so intentionally light on its feet.

The title tells you almost everything you need to know about its emotional register. Daniels circles around anxiety, ageing, social performance and the exhausting choreography of modern queer adulthood, but he never lets the material collapse into self-seriousness. Instead, he keeps the jokes flowing with an ease that makes the deeper material land more effectively. His comic persona knowingly admits that somewhere beneath all the introspection he may actually be fairly shallow (or at least deeply committed to appearing that way) but the brilliance lies in how self-aware that performance becomes.

Daniels understands that contemporary audiences want more than hearing a gay man recycle dating-app observations and familiar pop anecdotes. His comedy pushes toward something richer and more specific. He explores the strange emotional economy of queer social life: the way brunch becomes ritual, irony becomes armour, and self-analysis becomes both survival mechanism and personality trait. There is a distinctly millennial queer sensibility running through the set, but it never feels exclusionary. Even audience members outside those reference points were fully with him throughout.

A huge part of the evening’s success comes from Daniels’ improvisational confidence. While the written material is consistently strong, the room lifts during his spontaneous audience interactions. His off-the-cuff remarks create the sense that the performance is unfolding collaboratively rather than emerging from a rigid script. Some of the biggest laughs came from throwaway detours and reactive observations delivered with immaculate timing. Daniels has the increasingly uncommon ability to make a room feel simultaneously relaxed and electrically attentive.

And the crowd loved him.

Daniels' audience connection is an unusual space within current stand-up. So much contemporary comedy prizes polished detachment, but Daniels works from openness and warmth instead. There is a slight chaos to his performance style, the sense that any tangent could suddenly become the evening’s centrepiece, yet it always feels controlled.

There are also moments of pure theatrical silliness threaded through the show, Daniels’ Shakespearean detour of Kat Slater was a genuinely delicious delight: EastEnders melodrama reimagined with tragic gravitas and camp absurdity in perfect balance.

I enjoyed his refusal to flatten queer identity into either trauma narrative or marketable positivity, using his own advertising background to underscore that. Daniels allows queerness to remain contradictory, petty, vulnerable and ridiculous all at once. One recurring callback based on the unknowable illimitability of the Sugababes somehow became the perfect metaphor for the evening itself: absurd on the surface, unexpectedly existential underneath. Depth dressed as froth.

As a re-emerging talent, Daniels feels poised for a significant moment. This show shows a comedian moving beyond simply delivering punchlines into building a genuinely distinctive queer comic voice. With a sly offering of hope and resistance to the deliberately overwhelming complexity of modern life gently built into these musings. On the strength of this show, and particularly his ability to connect and delight through spontaneous audience interplay, Mark Daniels is one to watch.

Next show May 25th @ Junk Poets / Fringe, for more details or to book see the Fringe Website