So here is the latest news from the cutting edge: gay men are obsessed with sex, black men are well-endowed, Muslims are violent, George W. Bush is a retard, and Heather Mills has got only one leg and is probably up to no good.

Scott Capurro has built a reputation for shocking audiences, but the only thing that was unsettling about this show – apart from his laboured attempt to get some mileage out of the Madeleine McCann case – was how stale and complacent much of his material was. Ten or twenty years ago there might have been a frisson from all of this. But now? Some of the racial fantasies would have looked a little shopworn around the time that Lenny Bruce took his final bow.

Part of the problem with this evening is that the San Francisco comedian is trying to pump what is essentially a short club set into something grander and more significant. And so, as he hurtles along, barely pausing to draw breath, he tries to weave the sort of multilayered monologue that the late Spalding Gray made his own. The difference being that Gray was an egoist with sensibility and Capurro is an egoist with old jokes.

When he thinks he has said something particularly outrageous, he coyly glances up, waiting to hear the sharp intake of breath. But is there any reason why a Soho audience should be startled by the c-word or the notion that Aids is “slimming”?

Similarly, the throwaway lines devoted to Islamic fundamentalism would just about have passed muster in the months after 9/11. Capurro adds nothing new. In any case, the show is so rambling that any reasonably interesting point is lost amid the welter of self-regarding punch lines.

When the subject switches to his relationship with a Slovenian lover who is, in fact, a family man, the evening begins to acquire some depth. We finally glimpse the more vulnerable persona beneath the relentlessly wisecracking exterior. But it remains only a glimpse. Another tired joke soon sweeps into view.

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