Daniel Sloss

Anstruther to The Stand

Daniel Sloss was born on 11 September 1990 in Kingston upon Thames to Scottish parents, and the family moved to Fife when he was four. He went through East Wemyss Primary School and then Waid Academy in Anstruther. He was the oldest of four children; his sister Josie, who had cerebral palsy, died at the age of seven. He lives in Edinburgh now.

At 16, through his mother, he made contact with Frankie Boyle, who coached him during the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Sloss also wrote jokes for Boyle on the BBC panel show Mock the Week. His own first time on a stage came in October 2007 at The Stand in Edinburgh, and it lasted five minutes.

Eleven Fringes before thirty

The run of Edinburgh hours started immediately: Life in 2D in 2008, ten days on the Free Fringe. Teenage Kicks followed in 2009, his first sold-out full-length season, and at 19 he became the youngest comedian to play a solo West End season. My Generation came in 2010, then The Joker in 2011 — four weeks in the 400-seat Assembly Theatre at the age of 20. The Show in 2012 turned into a 50-date UK tour and a DVD recorded at the King's Theatre in Glasgow, released on 12 November 2012. Stand-Up followed in 2013 and Really...?! in 2014.

American work arrived through late night. He made his US television debut on Conan in December 2013 and went back ten times by 2019, with other appearances on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, @midnight, and Comedy Central's Roast Battle and Drunk History.

The hours that travelled

DARK, in 2015, was his seventh show and the one that broke him out of Britain properly — more than 80 dates across 15 countries. SO? came in 2016, NOW in 2017, and X in 2018, his eleventh Fringe season, which worked through masculinity and sexual violence.

Netflix put out two hours on the same day, 11 September 2018. DARK was filmed at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles; Jigsaw, which had toured as SO?, was filmed at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney. The closing stretch of Jigsaw, in which a relationship is treated as a jigsaw with the wrong piece forced into the middle, became the thing audiences brought up for years afterwards; Sloss's own running tally put it at over 120,000 break-ups, over 300 divorces and hundreds of cancelled engagements. X went to HBO on 2 November 2019, also recorded at the Enmore.

Since then he has distributed the recordings himself rather than through a platform. SOCIO appeared on 9 December 2022, filmed at the Paramount Theatre in Austin on 29 June 2019. Hubris followed on 21 December 2024, filmed at the Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow on 28 August 2021. CAN'T arrived on 6 December 2025, filmed at the TIM Theater Centre in Istanbul on 9 March 2024. A book, Everyone You Hate is Going to Die, came out in 2021.

Fatherhood, and a deliberate gap

HUBRIS toured through 2020 and 2021, CAN'T from 2022 into 2024. Reviewing CAN'T at the Plenary Theatre in Melbourne on 14 April 2023, Time Out gave four stars and described a show that went at paedophiles, abortion, religion and addiction while being visibly softened by new fatherhood — Sloss sitting down with a whisky to think, then jumping back up when he remembered it was a comedy gig. The write-up credited his narrative delivery and sensitivity, and said the back half could have been tighter.

The domestic timeline sits underneath all of it. He announced his engagement to Kara Mitchell in February 2021, their son was born in February 2022, they married on 20 May 2023, and their daughter was born in July 2024. He then took roughly eight months off work, which he had long said he wanted to do. He also appeared in the 2023 Channel 4 Dispatches programme Russell Brand: In Plain Sight.

BITTER, and the question behind it

The new material was first tested in front of audiences as a work in progress at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe. Reviewed on 24 August 2025, it ran about an hour and was scored 4.7 out of 5, with the reviewer noting how finished it already sounded. The content covered the break he had taken for his newborn daughter, breast milk, trying to make his daughter laugh, what he wants to pass to his son, Scottish insulting as a form of loyalty, and — more pointedly — the practices of the British comedy circuit, the Brand and Diddy scandals and his own appearance in the Channel 4 documentary. He worked through his contradictions as what he called a flawed feminist. The room reportedly tensed at the industry material before laughing.

Speaking to Beat ahead of the Australian leg, Sloss framed the show around a worry about his own contentment — "am I funny if I'm happy?" — and landed on the title's answer: "I'm a bitter person. Or at least, I'm a person and I experience bitterness." The show looks at the gap between the mature position on forgiveness and his own habit of holding grudges, and he has been clear the butt of much of it is himself. He also said the appetite comes back after a tour ends: "New material is hard, but when you've come off of a tour, you're very excited."

BITTER is his thirteenth solo show and is billed as his biggest worldwide tour. The UK run was announced on 6 October 2025, with a presale on 8 October and general sale on 10 October; it opened at Leicester's De Montfort Hall on 4 February 2026 and finishes with his first headline arena show in London, at the OVO Arena Wembley on 28 November 2026.

The 2026 map

Australia was announced in late November 2025 and ran through April: Hamer Hall in Melbourne on 12–15 and 18 April, Thebarton Theatre in Adelaide on 17 April, QPAC Concert Hall in Brisbane on 19 April, HOTA on the Gold Coast on 21 April, Canberra Theatre Centre on 22 April, five nights at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney from 23 to 27 April, and the Riverside Theatre in Perth on 29 April.

He went back to the Fringe with the finished version on 14 and 15 August 2026, playing the 2,000-plus-seat Edinburgh Playhouse at 8pm with a second, later bill at 10.30pm featuring Kai Humphries. The Friday performance was BSL-interpreted. Both nights sold out.

North America was announced on 10 February 2026: 34 cities with Live Nation, running from 8 May to 22 November. The routing takes in the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, The Wilbur in Boston, the Balboa Theatre in San Diego, The Masonic in San Francisco, the Moore Theatre in Seattle, the Paramount in Denver, the Palazzo in Las Vegas, The Van Buren in Phoenix, ACL Live in Austin, Bayou Music Center in Houston, The Fillmore in New Orleans, Tampa Theatre, The Tabernacle in Atlanta, the Warner Theatre in Washington DC, The Met in Philadelphia, Massey Hall in Toronto and the Olympia in Montreal, closing at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago on 22 November. The October stretch is close to nightly, from San Diego on the 15th through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Spokane, Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Austin, Houston, Dallas and New Orleans to Orlando on the 30th.

The billing he travels under now claims 55 countries played, nine consecutive sold-out off-Broadway seasons in New York, and a line from the New York Times calling the comedy dirty, sweet and clever. Between dates he and Humphries record the podcast Sloss and Humphries on the Road.