Reginald D Hunter, Soho

Reginald D Hunter wants us to know from the off that he will be using the “n” word in his show. A lot. Well, there’s a clue in the show’s title, The Only Apple in the Garden of Eden and Niggas, but that’s rather misleading; it’s less a description and more an in-joke from the time an earlier show’s posters (which also included it) were banned on the London Underground. So now he puts a rude word in the title of most of his shows and it pretty much indicates the Southerner’s style: punchy exposition tempered by knowing irony.

Hunter first came to the UK study at Rada and the actorly training is evident in his delivery; it’s measured, his languid Georgia tones caress the words and there are plenty of facial expressions to let us know when he is stepping between serious and comic moments. But when the material is stretched (as it sometimes is here), it’s a style that can feel a touch too deliberate and, as one real-life anecdote follows another (some of which seem fabricated), repetitive.

The comic covers a lot of ground with his observational humour - politics, relationships, gender and race - and much of it is terrific and delivered with great timing. After living in the UK for 12 years, Hunter is still learning the highways and byways of British humour, its inherent sarcasm and irony, and “clever ways of being indirect about what you think”. Sometimes, he says, it can take him days to realise he has been insulted by a Brit.

He makes much of being single at the moment and how he prefers hanging with his male pals, because, unlike girlfriends, “they don’t require a sexual aftercare service” of checking in and talking nonsense down the phone. It’s on the differences between men and women that Hunter excels, largely, I think, because it comes from the heart.

Although Hunter touches on Barack Obama’s election last November, there’s a criminal absence of any insightful, let alone funny, material about America’s first black president - it should be a gift to a comic who says he loves to think through the great issues of the day and talk about politics long into the night, but instead we get a flippant putdown. If Hunter is reserving judgment on someone who has been almost deified at home and abroad, I would be interested to know why.

He does an extended riff about doing a disastrous gig early in his career, which I first heard him do some years ago - not good enough for a supposedly new show, and one that lasts just an hour. And Hunter makes a point of telling us that the live version of him is “not the cuddly TV one” we have seen on Have I Got News For You or 8 Out of 10 Cats, but apart from the odd naughty word there’s little here to offend.

Reginald D Hunter continues at Soho Theatre, London until 21 November. Book here He then starts touring the UK in early 2010 Information