Comedy review: Lewis Schaffer: No You Shut Up!, The Hive (Venue 313), Edinburgh

“I WAS brilliant last year,” laments Lewis Schaffer, “so it can only get worse.” With many comics, perhaps. But not with Schaffer.

Here in the gloom of the Hive’s back room he paces, fretting over his placement at number eight on the Most Underrated Comics List; about the fact that he can’t even have a harrowing midlife crisis any more because he is post-mid-life; about the fact that he can never write shows good enough to match his brilliant titles and about the fact that everything in comedy has to be new. Meaning that he can’t charm us with his clever take on spina bifida or even impress us with his
 award-winning Holocaust material.

He does have new material, he shows us. But if it goes badly he might have to revert. A girl in the front row is given his set list and she directs the show. She is 19. This show might have changed her life.

Schaffer gets into his stride. Soon the entire room is hyperventilating as, at every turn, he appals and amuses in equal measure. He is, he tells us, “trying to broaden out from racism and misogyny”.

We are all, it seems, glad that he comprehensively fails so to do as most nationalities, all sexualities and anything with more than a hint of oestrogen bear the full brunt of his ire. And Schaffer’s ire has a brunt like no other. Although, as he points out, the fact that we understand the jokes and are laughing – and we are, helplessly, laughing – makes us the racists and misogynists.

He gleefully violates every comedy rule in the book, propositions the married woman behind me, flits like a slightly sinister comedy butterfly over a little light bestiality and paedophilia and comes to rest dripping venom on his ex-wife in particular and women in general.

An hour with Lewis Schaffer is an hilarious, cathartic, exhilaratingly appalling experience. He wants you to hate him. I, for one, just can’t.

Rating: ****

• Until 27 August. Today 4:45pm.