James Acaster

“I respect the rules, and so should you,” James Acaster tells us, wilfully disrespecting one of the most basic rules of standup comedy as he does so, by not actually standing up. He’s on his knees for the first ten minutes of this confident, well-structured and origami-like show, due to a “loophole” he’s discovered in the rules of performance. As with much of the set, it would be a shame to give away the details, as much of the pleasure here comes from Acaster gently and patiently unfolding the layers of his various comic conceits.

Chief among these is that we’re not watching Acaster at all, but an undercover cop by the name of Pat Springleaf, sent to infiltrate a group of gangsters selling drugs to comedians backstage. The case isn’t going well, but the comedy’s sort of taken off. It’s a great vehicle for Acaster’s nerdy and pedantic stage persona, which is at once self-conscious and gloriously un-self-aware.

But this is no hour of character comedy: the cop thing is simply a framework within which Acaster can fit the gently surreal skits and faintly OCD observations (his outlook on life is not unlike that of the equally brilliant and genuinely OCD Jon Richardson) for which he is becoming deservedly well-known.

At one stage, Acaster shows us a diagram to demonstrate the perfect way to fold a packing box: all the flaps overlap one another such that “they’re all the top flap”. It’s a great allegory for this show, which folds in on itself several times in a way that is at once ambitious, unassuming and satisfying in a defiantly odd way.