Andrew Lawrence: The Hate Speech Tour

With a caveat that these are just jokes and not to be taken too seriously, lest anyone imagines he's engaged in an attritional war of words with the liberal media, Andrew Lawrence has no interest in confounding his caricature as a comedy circuit pariah. With little sympathy for anyone claiming victimhood, he nevertheless adopts that position for himself at the top of his hour, blaming comedy journalists for a culture in which offence is too readily taken.

At his technically proficient best, he genuinely provokes and unsettles liberal orthodoxies, welcoming a terrorist attack on the festival with the cold-eyed pragmatism of someone aware of his place in the comedy hierarchy. And he embraces the Brexit voters in his crowd with tacit awareness that, anecdotally at least, some are xenophobic, an interesting position for a second generation Irish immigrant to take. There's merit in his suspicion of the people who get to choose which targets for his bile are legitimately defined as “punching down”. And he argues forcefully against his white privilege. Still, his constant recourse to pursuing the financial bottom line is indicative of an act in retreat rather than on the attack.

Too often he gets into a tedious screed of self-justification, with a lengthy tirade against the Independent newspaper being the most overt example. At least that comes from genuine hatred though. With his relationship and new baby, the misanthropy swells to crankily manufactured levels, the incessant cuntiness for the sake of it achieving diminishing returns.