Comedy review: GCF: America Stands Up - The Stand, Glasgow

Hosted, as ever, with aplomb by spiky San Franciscan Scott Capurro, his cattily offensive lines and audience teasing ensuring the guest acts could deliver their more provocative material without concern, last night’s annual showcase was devoted to comics from Chicago.

GCF: America Stands Up - The Stand, Glasgow

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Liza Treyger, a brash, “chubby Jewish girl”, affects a laissez-faire attitude to her job as a nanny and has an entertaining and needlessly cruel streak. At times, her low-energy drawl can make her seem unfocused. But she’s sardonically unconventional, insulting pregnant women and contriving some wickedly funny Holocaust gags.

Dwayne Kennedy has the crowd eating out of his hand immediately, selling each routine with an animated delivery. A charismatic performer if not a great writer, his validation of Barack Obama is a straightforward demolition of George W Bush. And he unquestionably nails it. His assertion that nobody likes Jesus like old black women is amusing in its pay-off and he’s astute on why texting is a modern, inane phenomenon.

Last up was Kyle Kinane, a minor revelation. A deadbeat, bearded schlub with a “dumb look”, he settles in with some acutely self-deprecating anecdotes, before sharing that a woman sighed in his face during sex recently. The springboard for a couple of tremendous routines about life, death, porn and Belinda Carlisle, Kinane is another in America’s long line of philosopher-comics, oddly affirmative in the depths of his depravity.