Sam Simmons @ Assembly George Square

Why A-K? The answer is simple: someone told Sam Simmons he was funny enough to read the phonebook. He’s not, but at least he figured that out early enough to put a very different show together. It’s weird and wild, but it doesn’t always work. His opening gag is a feat of endurance for him and his audience too, and a repeated bit of technical wizardry that repeats punchlines, regardless of their quality, never quite crosses the line back from annoying to funny again – although there’s a clever, if underplayed, deconstruction of the device.

Simmons plays the hostile comic, furiously berating his audience whether or not they laugh. “It’s an awful show to listen to, it’s an awful show to look at,” he says early on. It was almost convincing. He treads the line between enjoyably disgusting and despicable with obvious glee. Gut bulging from beneath a tiny costume, he lunges at members of the front row with innocuous questions that have them immediately on their guard, but never fails to get a laugh from them.

A narrative thread about his newborn daughter sits oddly with bits on porn names, racial dysmorphia and castrati. He wants to be a role model, he says, but the pointed disconnect between that sentiment and his act seems too obvious, and doesn’t match the self-aware, blistering comedy of the straighter stand-up sections of the act. Simmons carried some of his audience with him all the way, but others tripped on the cracks in this disjointed hour.

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Sam Simmons: A-K, Assembly George Square (Studio 3), until 27 Aug, 9.40pm, £12-16