One of a clutch of young US comics appearing at Glasgow's comedy festival, Lee Camp is from the Al Franken tradition: an impeccably liberal standup and contributor to the Huffington Post, he takes scornful, satiric aim at right-wing America. Jokes about US vulgarity find a ready audience in Britain, and Camp executes them with cheerful panache. I enjoyed his show, and the seriousness of purpose underpinning it. But his leftwingery gets predictable, and – rather like his bêtes noirs, Fox News and the Tea Party – deals in blacks and whites rather than shades of grey.
Camp hurtles through the conventional bugbears of liberal America – capital punishment, consumerism, dumbed-down TV – and displays a flair for phrase-making and sub-South Park invective. He doesn't play the fool, he's a comedy evangelist sermonising from his soapbox, and when he's at his best – on celebrities in the justice system, on the enthusiasm of anti-abortionists for the death penalty ("that's not pro-life, it's pro-crastinating") – we're a willing congregation.
The show is interspersed with video footage of Camp's playful activism: some droll (doctoring sweatshop-made products in shops), some weak (a spoof phone call to Texas governor Rick Parry's secretary). Mainly, his broadside against the modern world's "mindscape of mediocrity" is a familiar one, which massages rather than challenges our prejudices. Richer comedy might be found through sympathy with, rather than wholesale dismissal of, the millions who don't share his liberal views. But it remains a pleasure to encounter a comic passionate to address big, real-world issues, and with the skills to pepper his preaching with some blistering punchlines.
