Eddie Pepitone is doing two things in his current show. He’s howling with despair at the depravity and vacuity of modern living, and he’s deconstructing his own jokes. Entertaining as the show is, I’m not sure that the combination is doing him any favours. The argument about the debauched state of 21st-century America (Pepitone is a New Yorker) is forever being interrupted by self-reflexivity. And even if Pepitone never sets himself up as a crusader – he’s too misanthropic for that – the social commentary implies a moral outrage that the self-admiration tends to dissipate and undermine.
Each strand, to be fair, is funny in its own right. Pepitone is a fiftysomething, blue-collar ball of cynicism, here to tell us (strictly speaking: bark at us) about how he and his wife bond over shared hate; about how “I just love a car where you can regret your life. In comfort.” Having established himself at the dark heart of the existential abyss, Pepitone graduates to a series of lurid skits satirising mediated, corporate US culture: the “honest” BP ad in which a hostage dolphin has its brains blown out; the gameshow in which a gormless contestant must guess the price of the Iraq war.
These are funny mainly for the unrefined quality of Pepitone’s rage. The self-absorption’s droll too, as our host feigns satisfaction at the elegance of his comic technique (the joke being: we know he hates himself). But it’s also digressive, denying Pepitone’s thesis any chance to develop. As it is, his takedown of the smooth hypocrisy of modern life is - garishness aside - a fairly conventional one. We’re left, at least, with a series of vivid impressions, of a comic furious to scour the shine off the gaudy bauble of modern America - even if he seems quite amused at himself while he does so.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 24 May. Box office: 020-7478 0100
