It's weirder than the plot of a Kazakhstani soap opera. Later this month, the Bewleys Comedy Club hosts Australian comedian Steve Hughes, whose one-man show (appropriately entitled The Storm) led to him being labelled as an “anti-Semitic… left-leaning, angry, Australian conspiracy theorist". These accusations seemed all the more credible -- or incredible -- because they did not emanate from a Zionist Rabbi, but from fellow comedian Jamie Glassman, a writer on The Ali G Show, which featured the profoundly anti-Semitic ‘Borat’.

"It was a brutal attack on me really” says Hughes. “He made out that my gig was some kind of Nazi rally." I put it to Hughes that there is no smoke without fire, and he must have said something to annoy Glassman. “I told a joke: as a child, I was encouraged to play cowboys and Indians. Which is essentially a game for children about the joys of genocide. I know Australians can't claim much moral high ground on this one, but we never played ‘Cops and Aboriginals’. And you certainly wouldn't play ‘Nazis and Jews’.”

Writing in The Times, Glassman offered a different version of events, in which Hughes “suggests kids should stop playing Cowboys and Indians and replace it with Nazis and Jews.” Hughes responds, “How can I really believe a thing that he says he heard, if he understood the joke like that?” Glassman also claims that he heard audience members shouting ‘Throw them in the oven’ as they applauded.

Not having been to the same performance as Glassman, it's impossible to definitively confirm or deny his story. However, Glassman's judgement is in question. In the same article, Glassman accused Reginald D. Hunter (an African-American comedian) of anti-Semitism in his show Pride and Prejudice and Niggas. During the show, Hunter declared his desire to defy Austria's law on Holocaust denial. He wanted to fly to Vienna and proclaim "the Holocaust never happened!" Sitting in the audience at Edinburgh, I watched Hunter’s predominantly white, liberal, Guardian-reading audience grow visibly uncomfortable: would they have to take sides in a row between a black guy demanding free speech and the victims of Auschwitz?

Hunter continued: "... and when the judge asks me 'did you say that the Holocaust never happened?' I'll reply: ‘yes, your honour, but I was talking about the Rwandan Holocaust' ... and based on the response of the United Nations, the judge will say 'case dismissed!'." In a heartbeat, Hunter had transformed himself from the bad guy defending Holocaust deniers, into an incisive moral observer, reminding his white, European audience that for all their hand-wringing and vows of "Never Again", their countries didn't lift a finger to stop genocide in Africa. It was an escape worthy of Houdini. Glassman interpreted it as “a crack at the Jews".

In the insane media circus of Edinburgh, what initially looked like a cynical ploy by comedians to grab headlines, started to look more and more like a cynical ploy by headline-writers to frame comedians for the sake of a story. Hughes believes it is no coincidence that the article appeared during Israel's botched invasion of Lebanon: “who owns The Times? Rupert Murdoch. [Glassman and Murdoch] were definitely searching for anything to take the onus off Israel doing anything bad.”

However, Hughes is prepared to agree with Glassman on one point: “comedians have the job of piercing opinions in society and... breaking taboos”. Glassman went on to say that "they must also contemplate who they're going to offend when they write these jokes” but Hughes dismisses this as “bullshit… It is arrogant to think that you can prejudge what an audience is like. You have no idea." A moment later, he modifies this: "you can get a feeling sometimes. If it's thirty old women over 70, then probably don't start with your nun-fucking material". He relates the story of a ‘mate’ who told a joke about sharks and inadvertently offended several audience members whose friend had recently been eaten by one. You never can tell.

This seems an appropriate point to ask Hughes about his homeland, and why so many of its brightest comedians -- Adam Hills, Tim Minchin, Damian Clark -- have chosen to base themselves on this side of the world. “The British do misery well, so their understanding of comedy is excellent... You can really lay into the English if the punchline kills... They say "all right, that's fair enough. We are a bunch of dickheads”… The Irish and the Scottish are just naturally witty. I always thought to myself ‘if I can make the Irish and the Scottish laugh, then I'll be happy’.”

How does this compare to Australian audiences? “I've never done political comedy in Australia. It could almost become illegal down there. It's so right wing, so American. My mate rang me up the other day from Queensland and he said, "this is not the country we grew up in, mate." If a bomb goes off in a place like Australia, forget it: the place will just turn into a police state overnight."

I ask Hughes if he would like to conclude with the traditional gratuitous, patronising comment about how much he's looking forward to playing in Dublin? "I don't even have to make a dubious comment about coming to Dublin, because I fucking love it... I used to live in Ballinasloe."

And as for the charges of anti-Semitism, Hughes has made refuting them part of his routine: “I'm Australian. Australians love the Israelis – we both live on land we stole from other people. In fact, I'm an outspoken advocate of Jewish immigration. I'd like to see the entire Israeli state airlifted to the Western coast of Australia. We could call it 'Israelia'. Climate’s the same. Coastline's the same. Nobody lives there – we killed them all. We could put ads on Israeli television inviting them over. "Come to Israelia". And in the background we'd play the theme song from "Neighbours". Because as any Israeli will tell you: "everybody needs good neighbours."

Steve Hughes plays at the Bewleys Comedy Club, upstairs in Bewleys on Grafton St, on March 27th at 9pm. His latest CD Heavy Metal Comedy is available via www.MySpace.com/SteveHughesComedy