Henry Rollins is not a comedian – so how come he delivers one of the funniest, most fluent, most inspiring stand-up comedy shows at the Edinburgh Fringe? Well, the American punk-rock singer may never have torn it up at Jongleurs, but he’s been leading a parallel career with his spoken-word shows for 20 years. He knows how to tell a story. And he knows how to go out and find stories that are worth telling.

So Rollins crams his adventures from the past year into 75 minutes – which means, he tells us, he’s going to be like a 33rpm record played at 45rpm. He goes to see the Van Halen reunion tour in Chicago, where he looks around him to see his taco-munching, beer-swilling fellow citizens in action – no wonder, he decides, everyone hates America. He faces bugs in Laos and pimps in Thailand. He takes a Christmas holiday in Islamabad – just as Benazir Bhutto is assassinated. A ferocious self-improver, a body-builder and an autodidact, he runs towards trouble to indulge his curiosity.

We get the fruits. Much as he can amp up the anger, Rollins fires out his comical reportage with an artful articulacy that verges on courtliness. “I am not much given to vulgarity,” he says to a leering rocker – who turns out to be the outlandish Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth. Even Rollins can get tired of his own epiphanies: “I need distraction,” he says, “that’s why I always say yes to work.” Hence the stint as a disc jockey in Los Angeles. Hence the action film he’s just made – he’s not an actor either, he assures us, “I’m a bullshit artist”.

So his wisdom comes sugar-coated with the pleasure of vicariously living Rollins’s gentleman-adventurer lifestyle: we get to know how it feels to be accosted by fans and to roam the globe, searching for the truth. But this isn’t decadent. Quite the reverse. Rollins gives us the sense of our horizons expanding, of our fear diminishing. Backstage stories meets militant liberalism. It’s pretty damn great.

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