On tour
Every date the ticketer lists, worldwide · venue time
The profile · researched 18 October 2026
Hellbent: the Glaswegian who turned a wedding into a 40-date tour
Larry Dean spent a decade as the Edinburgh Fringe's most reliably nominated Scottish stand-up. In 2026 he joined the first cast of Saturday Night Live UK and put a show about his marriage on the road until February 2027.
Glasgow Southside, by way of Southampton
Dean was born in Glasgow on 13 December 1989 and grew up on the city's South Side, schooled at Belmont House before leaving for Southampton Solent University. The stand-up started while he was still a student, and it moved quickly: in 2013, at 23, he was crowned Scottish Comedian of the Year and took the new act competition at Bath Comedy Festival in the same year.
The early material drew on the things that were nearest to hand — Glasgow, Catholicism, and coming out to a strict Catholic family at 23, which became the spine of his 2015 Fringe hour Out Now!. That show earned him an Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination for best newcomer, the first of three nominations he would collect over the following decade.
He has remained a Celtic season-ticket holder throughout, which turns up in the act roughly as often as the accents do.
One Fringe hour at a time
Dean's career has been built almost entirely in the August room rather than through a single breakout special. Farcissist followed in 2016 and won the Amused Moose Comedy Award. Bampot, in 2018, was a show about being in love and brought his second Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination, this time for best show. Fudnut, in 2022, brought the third; the same year he was runner-up for British Comedian of the Year.
The pattern is a new title, a new set of disclosures, and a tour. Fandan became a Channel 4 special in 2023 — his only full-length broadcast hour to date. Dodger, in 2024, dealt with the autism diagnosis he had made public that year, and threaded in his partner's OCD. By 2025 he was back at the Fringe with an unadorned Work in Progress slot at Monkey Barrel, trying out the jokes that would become the next show.
Television has filled in around the live work rather than replaced it. He has done three series of Mock the Week, Live at the Apollo in series 13 and 16 as well as its Pride specials, Michael McIntyre's Big Show, two series of Roast Battle, The Stand Up Sketch Show, and a guest spot on QI's W series in 2025. He hosted the BBC New Comedy Awards in 2021, 2023 and 2024, and played the Royal Variety Performance in 2024 — an appearance that has since become a routine in its own right.
The SNL year
On 4 February 2026, Sky announced the inaugural cast of Saturday Night Live UK and Dean was on it, alongside Hammed Animashaun, Ayoade Bamgboye, Celeste Dring, George Fouracres, Ania Magliano, Annabel Marlow, Al Nash, Jack Shep, Emma Sidi and Paddy Young. The series launched on 21 March 2026 on Sky and NOW, six episodes, each with a guest host and a musical act, produced by James Longman with Lorne Michaels attached. Dean has since appeared in both series one and two.
It was an obvious piece of casting for a stand-up whose strongest tool is vocal: the accents and character turns that reviewers have fixed on since 2016 are exactly what a sketch cast needs. Critics covering his August 2026 Fringe run were explicit about the connection, with one noting that he has had less attention than some castmates while demonstrating precisely why he was hired.
He married Mikey Crump in Glasgow on 28 June 2025. The 2026 show deals with the wedding, the marriage, and a subsequent move to London — material that is now the engine of the tour.
Hellbent, August to February
Hellbent played the Pleasance Courtyard through 30 August 2026, in the venue's largest room, at £16 or £15 concessions. The tour was announced in March 2026 as a 42-date run through the UK and Ireland, opening in Bristol on 8 September and billed as a show about refusing to grow up. The schedule has since stretched well past its original December close.
As of mid-October 2026 the published dates run from the Gulbenkian Theatre in Canterbury on 20 October through Nottingham Playhouse, Hull, York's Crescent, Maidenhead, Newbury Corn Exchange, Southampton's Mayflower, Soho Theatre Walthamstow, Chelmsford, Bath, the Tyne Theatre and Opera House in Newcastle, Lancaster, Sheffield, Cambridge Junction, Milton Keynes, Swindon, Exeter, the Glee Clubs in Cardiff and Birmingham, Chorley, Kendal, Leicester, Southsea and Margate on 3 December, then Belfast's Limelight, Bristol Old Vic and the Brighton Corn Exchange on 13 December.
A 2027 leg follows: Leeds City Varieties on 1 February, the King's Theatre in Glasgow on 2 February, Eden Court in Inverness, the Alhambra in Dunfermline, and Vicar Street in Dublin on 6 February. Ticket prices across the run sit between £23 and £28.60, with start times between 7.30pm and 8.45pm and doors half an hour earlier.
What the reviewers disagreed about
The August 2026 verdicts split along a single line: everyone agreed on the craft, and divided on whether the craft had become a barrier. Fest gave Hellbent four stars, comparing his physicality and pace to Lee Evans, calling it a tour-ready hour and suggesting these were among the last chances to see him in rooms this size. BroadwayWorld also gave four, singling out the gag density, the physical comedy and an unscheduled Gollum impression, and describing the result as a surprisingly beautiful show built out of silliness.
Time Out took the other view at three stars, praising the accents — a routine about different kinds of Americans landed hardest — while arguing that the polish keeps the audience at arm's length, and flagging a Birmingham bit as well-worn. Chortle, reviewing on 30 August, framed the hour around two questions Dean put to his now-husband, "Am I a disappointment?" and "Will you marry me?", and judged it reliable but safe, a persona the festival has met before. A separate Fringe write-up scored it 3.7 out of 5 and noted the hour jumps between stories more than his earlier shows did, with callbacks doing the work of holding it together.
The disagreement is about register rather than quality. Nobody writing about Hellbent questioned that it works in a full room.
The show, now
Hellbent is a single hour with no interval, and on tour it plays mid-size theatres and arts centres rather than clubs — Nottingham Playhouse, the Tyne Theatre and Opera House, the King's Theatre in Glasgow, Vicar Street in Dublin — at £23 to £28.60, starting between 7.30pm and 8.45pm with doors thirty minutes before. Staging is bare: microphone, stand, nothing projected. The structure is one throughline — meeting his husband, the proposal, the wedding and the move south — broken up by set-pieces built on voices rather than props, including a run on types of Americans, an account of meeting the King at the 2024 Royal Variety Performance, airport material and family stories, with callbacks pulling the hour back together at the end. Reviewers at the Pleasance in August 2026 described breakneck pace and heavy physicality, and a comic entirely at ease with the room; one performance hit a technical failure that he folded into the act rather than waiting out. Crowd work is live and unscripted enough that no interaction looks predictable, and audience members are fair game. Ratings ran from three to four stars, with the dissent aimed at how polished it is rather than how funny — the four-star notices called it packed with gags, the three-star ones called it slick to the point of distance. The published tour listings name no support act.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · comedy.co.uk · comedy.co.uk · chortle.co.uk · chortle.co.uk · chortle.co.uk · chortle.co.uk · broadwayworld.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
JaceMerlyn · CC BY-SA 4.0
