Comedy review: Lewis Schaffer - Bigger and Blacker

IMAGINE this if you, jaded Fringe-goer, still can. A beautiful room, airy and spacious. Great lighting (albeit obviously for someone else’s show), comfy chairs and a fantastic comedian – forceful, funny, able to put down hecklers with a single lengthy anecdote about his ex-wife and offering some of the edgiest material you will find anywhere in Edinburgh. I love his pugnacious, in-your-face, New York delivery. If Joan Rivers and Robert de Niro ever had a lovechild, it would be a lot like Lewis Schaffer.

LAUGHING HORSE @ THE COUNTING HOUSE (VENUE 170)

Almost every laugh he gives us he then tops with another, bigger laugh. His American supremacist take on climate change and the property market, and his total indifference to all things British are brilliant. His apoplectic rant on circumcision is so heartfelt it must surely bring tears to the eyes of the Chief Rabbi himself, as, indeed, it did to every man in the audience.

His jokes about all things Jewish might have another comic arrested. But Schaffer has a watertight defence – though I’ll let him explain it (if I tried, it could get me fired). But it made me laugh. His revelation that the British are nothing more than a nation of dodgy estate agents is incredibly funny.

Schaffer blows a hurricane of freshness through many tried and tested subjects; he is unbelievably inventive and his delivery is masterful. His releasing to the press the information that he was sponsoring the Edinburgh Comedy Awards and renaming them The Louies was a PR stunt worthy of Mark Borkowski himself. Hear all about it here.

Until tomorrow. Today 6:40pm.