Andrew Lawrence is a bountiful little ball of hatred. He hates himself, with his red hair “the colour of sexual rejection”, with his voice that sounds like “Joe f***ing Pasquale”. He hates the fact that he’s paying £450 per week to stay in “some spunk-stained bedsit down by the docks”. You name it, he hates it.

Strange, then, that Lawrence is one of the most likeable and exciting acts around. I found last year’s debut show, which won him an if.comedy newcomer nomination, brilliant but unbearable. This year, he’s cut the music, kept the intensity but added a more palpable playfulness – as well as removing the guttural growl that used to make me clutch my Adam’s apple in alarm throughout his act.

Lawrence, a Londoner, is here to tell us how to be like him – to be social lepers. This, after all, is too harsh a world for the likes of us. Take housing – “no one can even afford the smallest caravan in the rapiest part of Leeds”. Take the people who live in those houses – no, please, take them. He launches into a demolition of the working classes that is almost psychedelic in its bitter articulacy, before going to on to do the same to the mimsy middle classes. He’s caricaturing, but he’s doing it with such vivid images and such enthused delivery that his rancour raises the room a foot above the ground.

He is grisly and abusive but so artful with it that you’d struggle to be offended. He debases himself first and foremost: mugged by teenagers, he makes noises “that sounded, I imagine, very much like a squirrel being fingered”. So there was fun as much as fury in his high-pitched demolition job on life’s indignities. It’s a joy to be in his contemptuous company.

Box office: 0131-556 6550