Jim Jeffries

If the happy-clappy brigade hate something, you know you’re on to a winner. And they really hate Jim Jeffries. Christian Voice magazine have labelled him “sick and repellent” and he has received hate mail condemning him to eternal damnation: 30, therefore, can't fail to be anything less than brilliant.

Last year's Second Coming was one of the highlights of the 2006 Fringe programme, an incendiary mix of the abrasive and the depraved. Jeffries proved himself to be a master storyteller with the ability to be both offensive in the extreme and thoroughly likable at the same time.

His new show, 30, is something of a departure. His act has been toned down greatly for this year's festival. Perhaps this is because he has struggled to find much high-profile TV work, something he complains about more than once. Perhaps, too, it could be as a result of getting punched in the head during a gig by an outraged fan during a Comedy Store gig in Manchester. Indeed Jeffries' reliving of this now infamous – courtesy of YouTube – event is the stand-out highlight from a very solid set. His wonderful self-deprecation during a scene by scene breakdown of the 'fight',makes for an exceptionally funny finale.

The rest of the set is structured around his frankly bizarre childhood and his family: the evil grandmother, "mental" brother, a dictatorial mother and a father, to whom he had to allocate a number of porn magazines syphoned off from the newsagents where he worked as a paper boy. Each tale is expertly woven and, at its best, reduces his entire audience to fits of painful laughter.

Unfortunately, while undoubtedly a master storyteller, Jeffries gives himself little room for manoeuvre and his set is not as ambitious (read: 'offensive') as it could be. He laments at the end that he is not a genius, that all he does is tell dirty stories and swear alot, yet he is capable of it and showed glimpses of his not inconsiderable comic talent. Reducing a room full of people to the verge of tears is a feat not many are capable of. It is unfortunate that much of his material does not push the boundary and, perhaps tellingly, the biggest laughs of the night were reserved for some of last year's material.