Tim Vine: The Joke-amotive

Coming onstage to rapturous applause, accompanied by a cheesy theme-tune and wearing an equally cheesy grin, Vine mimes a chugging steam train and immediately starts on the rail-related wordplay. "I found an old train ticket in my pocket, a day return. That took me back." Any of Vine’s jokes told in isolation would probably elicit a groan rather than a laugh, but his audience know what they’ve come for. A controlled torrent of dozens and dozens of these taut little nuggets of whimsy, which quickly wears down everyone’s defences and has us giggling helplessly at jokes that we’d probably punch someone for telling us in the pub.

He’s brought the usual mountain of props with him, including a number of novelty torches that he’s decided he doesn’t even need a punch line for. The set is punctuated with the odd musical interlude, some funny and some wilfully oblique, to give us a rest from trying to follow his every misplaced consonant.

You can’t imagine that Vine gets out much, or that he’s fantastic company when he does, given the amount of time his brain must be working away at new, half-formed gags. But he’s learnt to use his nerdy, slightly sad persona to his advantage, getting comically defensive on the very few occasions that he corpses – "Yeah, well you try remembering this shit."

"Genius," says the man sitting next to me at the end of the hour. When Vine is on top form like this, it’s hard to disagree.