Strange life, you'd have thought, to be a professional misery-guts - especially when you've parlayed that grumpiness into a lucrative career. Of course, there's plenty still to carp about. In this touring show, Jack Dee takes aim at dentists, chemists, cold-calling, mobile phones and plenty more besides. At his best, he expresses, and helps absolve, the daily bureaucratic frustrations experienced by everyone in his audience. But he is equally likely to aim at softer, blander targets. Tonight, mild grouchiness seldom becomes full-blown rage, perhaps because his subject matter is too pedestrian for even Dee to get excited by.
Dee's shtick, and it's usually a trusty one, is irritation disproportionate to the seriousness of the offence. When, at a rock concert, a band plays only new material, he's irate: "Do the hit you had before you sank into crack-addled oblivion, you wankers." Likewise, he takes a pop at interactive TV - which is a bit rich for a stand-up who ends his set by reading out text messages from the crowd.
There's plenty of material about family life: witness Dee's tortuous physical exasperation at the pace at which his infant son learns to write. But the ruthless unsentimentality only amuses for so long. When Dee claimed he would rather his kids watch TV than learn musical instruments, I craved a chink in the cynicism.
So, while Dee's legendary deadpan is as droll as ever, its application starts to feel arbitrary. If he reserved his miffedness for its most deserving targets, some mud might stick. But his scattershot irritation eventually dissolves distinctions between, say, the evils of telemarketing, and the banal observation that "my petrol cap from time to time swaps sides". As he talks grumpily and superficially about his loved ones and his alcoholism, you begin to feel that the real Jack Dee is being obscured, not revealed, by the indiscriminate grouchiness.
· At the Lowry, Salford (0870 787 5790), on Friday and Saturday. Then touring.
