Getting people to trip over their tongues has long been a staple of satire. And since 2016, satirical political commentary hasn’t exactly been in short supply. And yet the newbie talkshow Soft Focus With Jena Friedman is thrillingly unexpected: a bold blend of feminist politics and heart-in-your-mouth edginess.

Created by Friedman, a New York-based standup whose show American C*nt (her spelling) got rave reviews at the Edinburgh festival fringe in 2015, Soft Focus is a gonzo-style magazine show, whose second offering is now on Adult Swim. Although it has only run for a slim total of 40 minutes so far, it has featured a wannabe cannibal on a dating game, a suspected murderer running for president and the CEO of a sex doll company. In other words: if Friedman’s work is funny – and it really is – it’s at the outrageous end of the scale. And the outrage is first and foremost her own.

Friedman is an alumnus of the Daily Show – where she spent the last three years of Jon Stewart’s tenure as a field producer for Samantha Bee, John Oliver and Michael Che – and the Late Show with David Letterman. But she had been putting progressive politics on stage since way before either. Her first solo project, in 2007, was a satirical musical, The Refugee Girl Revue, which laid bare the twin issues of white privilege and anti-immigrant sentiment through a parody of deeply problematic American Girl dolls.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jena Friedman on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Photograph: CBS/Getty

Contrary to the male comedian shtick that it’s always only about the laughs, and never any agenda, Friedman believes everyone has an agenda. “Nothing is ever just a thing,” she says. “It’s never just a joke. There are a lot of guys online who supported Trump ironically – and then look what happened. People who think things aren’t political, they’ve had the luxury of going through life without things being political.” By people, she mostly means white men, the show’s primary target. Because, as she puts it, women and people of colour are – and until they are treated as equals will remain – political by virtue of their very existence.

Arriving at the Daily Show, she revelled in Stewart’s directive to go after whatever she cared about. “We’ll figure out the funny later,” he’d say. Friedman produced prescient segments on the minimum wage and the OxyContin epidemic. She helped Bee lay the groundwork for a prominent republican financial commentator to step in it, as he glibly labelled anyone earning $2 an hour “mentally retarded”. She studied economics, she says. “I knew how to get him.” She and Che also got a former Food and Drug Administration employee-cum-journalist to admit, on camera, that he was paid by a big pharma company. That hypocrisy writ large was where they found the laughs.

Friedman may have started out in sketch improv, but Stewart’s format – talking to real people in the real world – is what stuck: “It’s my favourite thing to do.” Soft Focus repeatedly showcases how thoroughly she has made it her own. Her strength is evident in the frequent impeccably timed knowing looks to camera whenever her guests come up with the goods.

In the opening credits of Soft Focus, Friedman’s voiceover announces that the show is the light touch that hard issues sometimes need. Those hard issues? Everything from campus rape and sexual harassment in gaming to #MeToo.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gilberto Valle on Soft Focus.

There’s an interview with the former NYPD officer Gilberto Valle, who was arrested in 2012 for apparently plotting to rape, cook and eat his wife and her friends on Dark Fetish Net – and who is now dating. Dating. As soon as Friedman read that, she knew she just had to “give people a heads-up”. The segment is part chatshow, part truly icky gameshow. Valle tells her he’s a normal guy who would never dream of doing anything to anyone without their consent, then nods in full agreement as she lays out exactly what he did to get arrested. When Friedman gets him to confirm he is dating, she brings out three contestants, Take Me Out-style, who each ask him a question, then answer two of Valle’s. He asks them all where they live and how fast they can run – a chilling TV moment if ever there was one.

And then there’s John McAfee, the anti-virus software developer turned murder suspect, who has declared a second run for the US presidency, as the libertarian hopeful, in 2020. “I think people who are running for president, we need to talk to them as soon as we can,” she says. “Because it’s anyone’s game at this point.” With unswerving focus – apart from when McAfee pulls out his gun and one of his bodyguards forgets he’s holding one too and inadvertently points it at her – she quizzes him about his suspected criminal past, his run-ins with the US government (he tells her he once hacked the government’s entire IT system) and his bombastic tweeted pledge to eat his own dick if bitcoin doesn’t perform as well as he says it will. She somehow gets him to repeat this promise eight times. (It’s the only bit in the segment where she cracked up and had to do another take.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John McAfee on Soft Focus.

As a host, Friedman is an intriguing blend of concern, coyness and deadpan wit. She looks and listens like a health professional – the doctor on to whose chair you gratefully slump – then trips up viewer and guest with something so subtle you’re past it before it hits you. “People don’t think I’m going to be funny,” she says. “It’s a way of being under the radar.” It allows her to sneak in the kind of pointed line a more exuberant delivery might have dimmed, such as when she asks McAfee to define, “for those who don’t know”, what makes a libertarian “other than a white guy who’s too cheap to pay for birth control”. She has perfected the “Wait … what?” approach to making you laugh.

Underpinning, or perhaps, threatening to unravel Friedman’s comedy – and it’s this tug-of-war that keeps you glued – is her awareness of the problems she is addressing. She does a whole segment at the end of her standup show on toxic masculinity and how to get to the root of it. How do you help men? There’s such comedy in that question – “How do we be better to men?” – but it’s also a truism, and an urgent one at that.

Friedman’s field reports hum with the need to effect change: trying to get college guys to think about consent and what it’s like to be a college girl; trying to get male gamers to think about what it’s like being a female gamer. “You’re just trying to get people to see things in a way that they haven’t.”

For a Gamergate-inspired segment, Friedman recruited four male gamers to play a VR game based on life as a woman as defined by #MeToo. (“I love that we just call it #MeToo,” she says. “It’s such a cute little euphemism for rampant misogyny, sexism and rape culture in our present, patriarchal society.”) Cue an adult film actor playing a Harvey Weinstein character doing very Weinstein things in an interview (there’s a potted plant) that the gamers experience sitting alone in a room, on a chair, with a VR headset on. It has added sensory detailing (a sausage on a stick poking, a spritzer squirting) to make the experience more lifelike and the guys more uncomfortable. They are – for the most part. One of them says that victims, essentially, may be asking for it, but says that he doesn’t actually know any female gamers. Another, of his own volition, brings Trump into the mix, saying that men who harass women shouldn’t be elected and that he’s a Maga supporter. “I don’t know,” he says. “Are you guys making correlations with Trump voters and …”

“No,” Friedman replies. “You just did that yourself.”

Soft Focus with Jena Friedman is on Adult Swim.