It is the opposite of postnatal depression: Mock the Week star Frankie Boyle is cracking jokes only hours after the birth of his child. So has the miracle of a new life sent the hard-boiled Glaswegian stand-up soppy? Hardly. On the Spice Girls reunion: "The only way I want to see Geri Halliwell draped in a union flag is if she dies in battle." Boyle is as cynical as ever, which might be a little wearing but for the cheerfulness with which he dispatches his perfectly constructed, weird and wicked one-liners: "John Prescott is so fat, he can't wear a belt and tie on the same day in case he turns into sausages."
What you get here is the made-for-comedy accent of Billy Connolly plus the raise-a-stink sensibility of Jimmy Carr (though Boyle, unlike Carr, leaves race out of his provocateur's repertoire). He trades in laugh-when-you-know-you-shouldn't gags, and usually I was laughing too much to be troubled by Boyle's occasional cruelty. Mind you, there was hardly time to be upset on anyone else's behalf: he directs much of his abuse at ginger-haired Scots like me (and him). Boyle has the best of this year's innumerable John Smeaton jokes, mocking the idea that Glasgow airport's have-a-go hero "prevented hundreds of people getting badly burned. These were Scottish people going on holiday to Spain."
With neither chat nor emotional intimacy to fall back on, you have got to be good to sustain this gags-driven comedy. And Boyle is. His eye for absurdity is as sharp as his suits, and his imagination comes to life in vivid Technicolor, as with one gloriously ghastly riff on the oldest woman in the world to give birth. It looks like this doting daddy will survive parenthood with his ruthlessness very much intact.
· At Cambridge Theatre, London (0871 297 0742) on December 9 and 16. Then touring.
