I’ve always enjoyed Frankie Boyle’s TV appearances, but the Scottish comedian’s tendency to take a joke too far, and say something truly repulsive, invariably made me question whether I could take a whole show of it. If you watched Mock The Week during the days when he was a regular panellist or Tramadol Nights, his Channel 4 show that was cancelled in the wake of one especially vile gag – you’ll know what I mean.

Since then the Glaswegian has had something of a minor makeover. The humour is still unremittingly dark but the vicious takedowns are largely focused on acceptable targets such as politicians and billionaires and the damage they’re inflicting on people and the planet. He still has the capacity to shock of course, but as the terrific monologues in his now cancelled TV series New World Order illustrated, he has a brilliantly incisive way of dissecting the state of the planet, as well as butchering those politicians and their politics.

I expected Lap Of Shame to effectively be a whole night of this, but as hilarious as it often was, Boyle’s scattergun approach made for an undeniably disjointed affair. There was plenty of riot to go with the revulsion (often simultaneously), but no discernible thread or structure to proceedings, unless you count his questioning of what it’s acceptable to joke about in modern society.

His answer was everything of course, but whether the argument that “it’s all an act” was true or simply an excuse to justify his material proved a moot point, as even the most distasteful content – some of which Boyle softened by making himself, and his lack of morals, the butt of the joke – earned appalled laughs from a partisan (as well as apparently Covid-ridden) audience.

Whether those laughs were attempts to distract from the horrific images the comic had conjured up is arguably worthy of greater debate – Boyle’s lyrical descriptions and imaginative similes consistently as vivid as they were lurid (eating clams one classic example), and an area where he truly excels. That made his skewering of the likes of Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman (“makes Priti Patel look like Moses”), Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer (“looks like the picture that comes in the frame when you buy it”), Donald Trump (“a Quaver on top of a Wotsit”) and Joe Biden (“a laptop running on 4%”) even more entertaining, even though it occasionally felt a bit too easy and throwaway.

The comic has claimed that “it feels like the last proper tour for me”, and the sense of treading water and maybe even a little boredom creeping into this performance supported the notion – not least when he resorted to asking audience members what they did and where they came from for inspiration. It was a move as unexpected as it was mundane from a performer not only far too accomplished for such a trick but who shouldn’t need to pad out a set that barely lasted 70 minutes.

4 stars

Reviewed by Steve Adams at Warwick Arts Centre on Wednesday 4 October. Frankie Boyle’s Lap of Shame returns to the venue on 6 February 2024. He also plays Birmingham Alexandra on 6 November, Malvern Theatres on 22 November, the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry on 27 February 2024 and Wolverhampton Grand Theatre on 8-9 April 2024.