REGINALD D Hunter is one cool dude. I can say this from first hand experience having met the man less than half an hour before he was due to go on stage in the Oxfam Moot at Hay Festival.

I caught his eye as he was crossing from the artists’ area to the large tented arena where he was about to entertain hundreds of people for a solid hour on Wednesday evening (May 31). Instead of ignoring my stare, as I’m sure many in his position would, he came straight over, offered his hand and asked me, “So what you doing here, man?” “Um, well I’ve come to see you,” I offered. With his huge paw still round mine, he gave me a smile, and said: “Well you’ve got guts, man” and walked on.

Guts? What did he mean guts?! I looked down at my stomach, not washboard flat I’ll admit, but surely not as large as Reginald D’s. Anyone who’s seen Have I Got News For You on telly will know he’s a big, laid back, black comedian from the Deep South of America with long dreadlocks and a ready smile who makes 6ft 4 Paul Merton look pretty small and Ian Hislop look like a midget (well, ok... but you get the picture).

Guts? Maybe he was going to somehow get a huge spotlight to single me out in the audience and make me the butt of his jokes, like some cheap Comedy Store comedian, as retaliation for me daring to interrupt his progress and thought processes before a gig.

Or maybe his act, which I’d never seen live before, was going to be so near-the-knuckle in its challenging rudeness to a mostly white, middle-class, book-reading audience at Hay that it would feel like a slow motion car crash only to be endured by the foolhardy or brave.

Well it was a little bit of the latter – but Reginald D Hunter is naturally such a nice guy, he managed to get away with saying some pretty outrageous, nay shocking, stuff without losing his audience.

In fact, mostly, they loved it. He began by appearing to make a pretty big faux pas in these parts – confusing Wales with England.

“Hey Hay! He-e-e-y Hay! I’d first like to say, no word of a lie, this very day is exactly 20 years since I’ve been living here in England. (Cue applause and one or two whoops) Thank you – the UK! The UK! Ha ha!”

Whether this was a deliberate slip or not it’s hard to say, but it sounded pretty authentic – and for that came across as all the funnier.

It has to be said his language, away from the small screen, is pretty choice. The c-word was there after about two sentences. And the word he used to describe Donald Trump is not one in the context he used it that I’d care to repeat in a family newspaper (or its website) – let’s just say it sounded like he was saying Americans had just elected a ’toad’ to be their new president. (Well it was a four-letter word that began with a t and ended with a d and sounds a bit like toad – but it’s even less pleasant if you step on one).

The F-word was there too.

But it wasn’t just swear words, it was his slang terms and choice of subjects such as n***ers, Jews, faggots and “white bitches”. But then swearing on stage and using bad words is pretty much routine in live comedy these days, so so far, so not very shocking.

What was really shocking came later on in his act, when I had a real sense he was testing his audience (“You book-reading motherf***ers!”). His agent, he said, had been imploring him in his current tour to be a little less controversial and a bit more uplifting, with some “nice fun, bouncy stuff”.

Cue a short skit where he pretends to give us his impression of Bill Cosby, a man he says whose three rules in his professional career were to “never work blue, never be confrontational – especially racially – and to always appear to be sexually non-threatening”. That last line of course is the cause of some uneasy laughter and sure enough we get a new twist as he ventures into talking about ’Dark Bill’ before seguing into a longer skit about German chancellor Angela Merkel, who he feels must tire of being cheerful and calm all the time and probably has a Greek man she tortures in her basement where she becomes ’Dark Angela’ (“let’s play a game called, ’You got my f***ing money!’”). The audience’s laughter pretty much sticks in its throat though when he suggests the words little Greek man (which in the skit do sound funny) are substituted with the word ’Jew’.

Suddenly that joke doesn’t sound so funny any more.

Similarly a short monologue about how he fell out with his best friend after she opened her heart to him about her rape by a friend becomes a test of the Hay audience’s mostly liberal sensibilities when he reaches the punchline.

The best bit by far was earlier in the show when Reggie (I feel I can call him Reggie now as he’s my best pal) talks about filming his TV series Songs of the South in which he returns to his homeland and explores the history of some of its music, while using the cover of “an all-white BBC film crew” to visit some of the white, Redneck areas of the Southern states that he would never have dared venture into before he became a successful entertainer.

How a naïve but stern “BBC producer lady” manages to persuade him to dress in a Confederate Army general’s uniform at a Civil War reenactment weekend during the July 4 celebrations is still a little mystifying but hilarious in its telling (“Ma’am, if them white people see me in that – we will never be dead enough!”)

Continuing the race theme there’s a longish section, which he warns us isn’t meant to be humorous, about Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird and why she didn’t write a sequel (“what would it be called, ’To Kill a Mockingbird II’, ’Skinning the Budgie’?!”) but was “literary-ily raped” when she got dementia and her estate published her earliest manuscript called Go Set a Watchman. “Told you it wasn’t funny”, he says, when the audience merely claps.

But apart from him appearing to struggle towards the end when he has to ask for his “end of show drink” and starts to slow down his delivery to fulfil his “contracted” hour, this is a funny, well-paced show that not only amuses his audience but also challenges some of the assumptions of those who may have thought they were going to see that “funny guy off HIGNFY” but got a heck of a lot more.