Eddie Pepitone's Bloodbath

US standup Eddie Pepitone isn’t scared of hecklers. With his own deep level of self-loathing, he himself can far outdo any insults audience members might throw at him. At one point he even steps into the crowd to show us how it should be done, if we really knew what was going on inside his head. The result is an unsettling torrent of self-contempt, and it's painfully funny.

He’s a man full of seething fury—at hypocrisy, TV commercials, Twitter and himself—and he lets it out as a relentless, high-energy stream of vitriolic wit. If you don’t like one gag, there’s another immediately behind it, and it all combines in an ever-expanding cloud of cynicism. Some of his targets are a bit obvious, but he has plenty of fresh and often shocking angles on them – he tells it like it is, and doesn’t spare anyone his rage, least of all himself.

There’s an excellent riff on a TV commercial audition, where Pepitone manages to turn an innocuous remark about the freshness of newly laundered shirts into a despairing attack on our fractured society—it’s breathlessly funny, and he’s got a point. He might not always hit his target—a few routines fall a bit flat—but he soon lets us know when he thinks he’s failed.

Pepitone is remorseless in his realisation that he’s craving approval from a roomful of drunks, but that’s just what he gets. And with his screaming yet appallingly funny outrage, he has us all on his side.