Dwight Slade

Pleasance Dome 4 / 5 stars
Dwight Slade
Entertainingly vicious ... Dwight Slade. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Dwight Slade has recently been entertaining the troops in Afghanistan - the US troops, he emphasises, not the Taliban. But on the evidence of this show from the man best known as teenage sidekick to the late, great Bill Hicks, the response might be as prickly from the former audience as from the latter. For Slade paints an entertainingly vicious picture of his native US, asking: "Can I find my own soul in this soulless country?" In Bagram, I hope he wore a flak jacket: his US is worldviews away from the land of the free for which GI Joe presumably assumes he's fighting.

Mind you, I'm sure the squaddies could identify with Slade's impotent rage, which is the motor of this hour-long set. Setting himself up as an increasingly bitter middle-aged man cursed with looking a bit like Luke Skywalker, Slade trades in disproportionate indignation at America's foibles. He has, he says, a "dark monkey" on his shoulder, the incarnation of his anti-social impulses. Onstage, he pays the monkey heed, and mimes pummelling with a pool cue all the hands-free mobile users, noisy fellow passengers and Harry Potter readers who make Slade's modern life so rubbish.

There's a point to this cartoon violence. According to Slade, Americans are raised to believe in revolution and the right to complete freedom, but (given no political outlet for these feelings) they now enact revolution on one another in the form of incivility. It's a land of schadenfreude and mutual resentment, of "paranoid eyes glaring at each other through mini-blinds". The apotheosis of this America comes in the hilarious wordless sequence (an old favourite) with which Slade ends his show: one man alone at the wheel, led on an emotional odyssey by the tunes on his car radio towards a climactic fury of gunshots and testosterone. Edinburgh audiences will laugh heartily. I suspect it struck a few nerves in Afghanistan, too.
