Car-crash comedian, anyone? From the reports at last month’s Latitude Festival, where the American comedian and actor Janeane Garofalo abandoned her set after only ten minutes, we were braced for her Edinburgh debut to be a major-league dud. The biggest turkey since her former Larry Sanders Show co-star Sarah Silverman tanked it in Hammersmith earlier this year.

Well, sorry to disappoint bad-news fans, but Garofalo is no fiasco. Granted, the first half of her show is blighted by an obvious oppositionalism that has her spitting teeth at rotten Republicans in a way that must play more bracingly in the American heartland. Stalking the stage in her shorts and tights, her face half-hidden by black-rimmed glasses and long raven hair, she tries to kick up a fight with her no-nonsense atheism. The nonplussed crowd declines the bait: “I keep forgetting I’m in Scotland,” she sighs, “it’s so different.” But, when she’s not just using overstated anger as a default setting, Garofalo proves to be a comedian whose disdain for the norm goes far deeper than the tattoos on her arms.

Talking about her devout parents, and the way she amped up her Catholicism at the onset of puberty, she reveals a vulnerability that makes her grouchiness so much more interesting. She got over her shyness only when she discovered alcohol; she got over alcohol only when she got fed-up of the blackouts, the bruises. But don’t expect sanctimony: “Why am I a drinker?” she muses. “Because it’s f***ing awesome!” Starring in Nineties films such as The Truth About Cats & Dogs made Garofalo a quirky sex symbol. She herself claims to have no libido, argues for her unattractiveness — her unsexy tights, her flappy arms, the diarrhoea disaster that led her and her boyfriend to throw away all their sweat pants — and would rather be alone, thank you very much, than pretend to be enjoying herself in a group of strangers.

Garofalo has an angle on her outsiderdom, an inspiring impatience for the inadequacy of the labels we stick on ourselves. She’s not assured enough to make all this stuff funny, exactly. But as she picks apart her foibles in a gutsy, so-sue-me way — “Middle-class douchebag, that’s all I am” — she becomes an increasingly compelling performer.

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