Simon Amstell filling your Spirit Hole/Photo credit: David Levene

Overwhelming fear of ageing and death, issues with one’s father, shame, inadequacy and the redemptive power of hallucinogenic drugs: Simon Amstell's stand-up and, indeed, his entire career has settled into a shallow groove of self-obsession and familiar neuroses. Happily, his abiding insecurities, the ferocity of his internal interrogation and an instinctive puckish mischief mean that there's little danger of the 42-year-old growing boring.

His open relationship allows him to ponder the options that come with settled, middle-aged domesticity, suggesting a previously unlikely scenario that he and his boyfriend might have a baby, a child who, he ponders, could become a more successful comedian than him. Yet at the same time, he's reporting back from his adventures in a Berlin sex club and heading out on amorous safari in New York, with typically destabilising results.

Spirit Hole is arguably Amstell's most nakedly horny show yet, with animalistic freedom perpetually checked by his tendency to over-analyse in the moment. Certainly, it's the one in which he most enthusiastically embraces disappearing up his own fundament, almost literally so in his latest drug-induced voyage of discovery. There is not a single stray thought he can't twist to undermine himself. Endearingly, he often projects these flaws onto everyone else, knowingly betraying much more about him than society.

Occasionally though, he's genuinely persuasive, his satirical takedown of the marketing of moisturiser to men extended into a vision of the coming, commonplace future sale of anal sex toys to heterosexual blokes. Amstell seldom convinces as an enlightened sage but the laughs come thick and fast with his frustrations.

Reviewed at Tramway, Glasgow.