ON THE RADIO

OOH, a Radio 4 comedy that made me snort tea down my nose with laughter. You don’t get many of those to the pound of Darjeeling. But Alex Edelman’s Peer Group on Tuesday night at 6.30pm did just that.

I think it was the line about the Illinois congresswoman Mary Millar who made a speech to the protesters who would go on to storm the government buildings last January that included the line, “Hitler was right on one thing …”

Which, as comedian Alex Edelman, pointed out, “is never a good sentence. Whenever anyone says that, I’m like … ‘Moustaches. Please say moustaches.’”

Edelman, pictured right, is a new name to me, but this is his fourth series.

The first, though, that is just straight stand-up. Turns out, he’s very good at it. A proper old-school New York Jewish comedian. Or maybe new school, given that he’s only in his early thirties.

In this first episode he made fun of his own Jewish identity, compared the Old Testament God to the New Testament Jesus and had a go at the anti-Semitism of elected Republican politicians like Georgian Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green who has claimed that Obama was a secret Muslim, the Parkland shooting was a fake, Ruth Bader Ginsberg was replaced by a body double and Hillary Clinton kills kids in a secret satanic ritual.

“By the way,” Edelman said, “if Obama really was a secret Muslim, he hid that really well. He’s really playing the long game on that.”

Talking of the ridiculous QAnon conspiracy theories that are running riot in altright circles in the US, he pointed out that the idea that there are Jewish Democrat paedophiles who ingest a drug harvested from the adrenaline of terrified children is not simply a conspiracy theory.

“It’s also the plot of the 2001 movie Monsters Inc. How has no one pointed out that? When will Democrats learn that the laughter of children is more powerful?”

Edelman is a reminder of why the best comedians are always Jewish. He’s smart, self-deprecating and there’s an anger not too deeply buried under the surface. Oh yeah, and he can make you snort tea down your nose.

“We made ET, Blazing Saddles and the polio vaccine,” he reminded us at one point, summarising the Jewish contribution to culture and society. “What more do you want?”

Earlier the same day and on the same channel, Radio 4 celebrated Glasgow’s rave scene in Daft Punk is

Staying at My House, My House.

A celebration of Slam, aka DJs Orde Meikle and Stuart McMillan and their record label Soma which was the first to put out a record by Daft Punk, this was a lyrical and surprisingly political recollection of Glasgow’s early clubbing days.

With a commentary written by novelist Kirstin Innes and narrated by Kate Dickie, the programme followed the journey from shipbuilding to techno in the early 1990s.

The details were not always pretty. “The hotter it got the more strange brown liquid would drip from the ceiling,” Dickie said of nights at The Arches.

“You learned pretty quickly not to wear your new Stan Smiths.”

Thankfully, there was no accompanying scratch-and-sniff card.

LISTEN OUT For Woman’s Hour, Radio 4, Monday, 10am.

As from today the programme is now an hour long. Not such good news for the 15-minute drama slot dumped as a result, though.