Mark Whitney is a convicted felon. The door-to-door vacuum salesman turned (somewhat willing) victim of predatory lending tells the audience his tale in the one-man Fringe Festival performance Fool for A Client. The story, naturally, is more than just his time in the clink; it’s a scathing look at modern society’s Zero Tolerance culture that’s responsible for everything from the notoriously critiqued Federal Sentencing Guidelines (a calculator decides your fate) to school district rules that expel children for having a couple of aspirin pills.

Truth be told, fellow one-man storyteller Mike Daisey’s treatment of (almost) the same subject during the 2008 festival was better — but only just, and Whitney’s personal story and rapid-fire joke-telling skills make this a fresh enough take to see, even if you’ve seen Daisey. Whitney doesn’t ask for sympathy for his own tribulations, but tells the story of representing himself in court and on appeal as a vehicle to describe our country’s obsession with security theater and fear of everything, to the point where we will throw people’s entire lives away for literally next to nothing. Whitney manages to skewer our “post-Constitutional America[n]” culture by easily transitioning between real-life stories — like that of strip-search victim Savana Redding — to a quick power round of dick jokes, to which even this toilet-humor-hating critic has to tip her hat.

Whitney occasionally falls victim to his own delivery, whipping out the jokes so fast that audience members turned to their date en masse to ask what that last word was. By and large, Whitney’s storytelling is as entertaining as it is infuriating, and a fine Fringe offering for anyone wondering, “how did we get here?”

Fool for A Client has three more performances during the Fringe Festival: July 18 at 11 a.m., July 20 at 9 p.m, and July 23 at 10:30 p.m at the Mead Theatre at Studio Theatre.