It’s late and the audi­ence at Up the Creek has watched two hours plus of com­edy before Dwight Slade comes to the stage. And yet, after 30 sec­onds of Slade, every­one feels wide awake; elec­tri­fied, no less, by a standup who knows how to fill the room – with con­fi­dence, with per­son­al­ity, with himself.

It’s not that the American’s mate­r­ial is, on this occa­sion, par­tic­u­larly excit­ing. Jokes about hands-free mobile phones? Jokes about the unthreat­en­ing aggres­sion of chi­huahuas? Not incen­di­ary stuff, at least on paper. And yet, Slade tow­ers over the other standups on the bill by dint of tech­ni­cal artistry alone.

His Amer­i­can­ness may have some­thing to do with it. Of course, there are the echoes of his old part­ner Bill Hicks, with whom Slade shares vocal tics and man­ner­isms. (Who knows whose they were in the first place?) And Slade cap­i­talises on his out­sider­ness. He barges on stage with noisy apolo­gies for his nation­al­ity. He’s all Amer­i­can breezi­ness, lack of inhi­bi­tion, and feigned inno­cence of propriety.

Tonight offers just a taster of the full set, in which Slade tells us about his recent break-up, and his fish-out-of-water expe­ri­ences as a vis­i­tor to the UK. It’s a more friv­o­lous 25 min­utes than the state-of-America set he brought to Edin­burgh in 2006: much of it involves Slade imper­son­at­ing crabs, or telling us how scared he is when he kills a spi­der but can’t find the corpse.

But it’s deliv­ered with effort­less crafts­man­ship, in which lin­guis­tic econ­omy, vocal empha­sis and – most notably of all – phys­i­cal antic come together to max­imise the funny. There’s a histri­onic dumb­show in which Slade feigns a fly­ing bug trapped in his mouth. There’s a TV doc­u­men­tary about seals, star­ring Slade as the blank-eyed beasts. And best of all, there’s the skit in which he recre­ates a sexy phonecall to a date. He begins with Barry White’s sex­ual self-confidence and much heavy breath­ing into his micro­phone – which throws into relief his reac­tion when the woman at the end of the line says: “Tell me about your cock.” Slade’s embar­rass­ment – and it’s all in the eyes – is hilar­i­ous. The top­ics are worka­day – but Slade has expres­siv­ity to burn, and tech­nique to die for.

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