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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Brian Logan

Glenn Wool

Glenn Wool has made a great leap forward, which can't be easy for someone this laid-back. I've sometimes found the surreal, stoner perspectives of this likable Canadian émigré a bit lightweight in the past. But this year's set splices Wool's trippy chat together with some pertinent material about prejudice and cultural identity. It's a neat fit, as when Wool says that he'd have opted for Hinduism had he been given a choice as a child, because it offers a god with an elephant's head. When the real world's this weird, who needs surrealism?

The premise for Wool's show is that he's trying to locate hell. Is it a place? A state of mind? Or, in this instance, just an excuse to lampoon as many religions as possible? But he makes smart points, about how we overindulge followers of all faiths: can you imagine, he asks, if gays were allowed to teach their children to kill the religious? Delivering this material, Wool drolly monitors the audience's responses to each joke, branding us prejudiced according to how offended or amused we are at each one. For the record, I most enjoyed his quip about Heath Ledger's desperation to look heterosexual at the Academy Awards. "I'm just glad he didn't win the Oscar. The whole speech would have been tips on how to buy a lawnmower."

The longer the set continues, the more tenuous Wool's material becomes. But it's still funny. There's an entertaining segment on cloning, and another in which Wool defends his home country's record on seal killing - by making out that the seals are the real bad guys. As for the real bad guys, al-Qaida, Wool issues a call for terrorism with a sense of humour: "Find out who makes landmines, then put them in his back garden." Wool may never locate hell, but with this new show, he's inching closer to comedy heaven.

· Until August 28. Box office: 0131 226 0000.

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