Seymour Mace: Shit Title

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Consolidating the appeal of last year's Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated show, Seymour Mace's latest hour mixes shambolic surrealism, knockabout daftness and moments of gently affecting introspection.

Welcoming the audience from behind his keyboard with I Want to Know What Love Is, the first of several 1980s power ballads belted out, he claims Shit Title as the only accurately named show on the Fringe, before establishing his version of The Generation Game. Playfully rigged to favour one contestant over the other, it's a triumph of contriving belly laughs from little beyond Mace's will to entertain and desire to create a spectacle, getting the crowd onside for his equally unpredictable version of Family Fortunes.

He disparages a long-in-development character he has, but it's an audio-visual standout. And there's an obligatory return to the window of his venue, the abiding memory of 2015's show, for a bleakly funny set-piece. Emphasising the additional pressure that newfound scrutiny of his comedy has brought him, he fosters the impression of a still troubled soul away from the stage, alternating between light-hearted allusions to, and an explicit visual representation of, his depression.

Shared with feeling, his faltering romantic life elicits a palpable bitterness but also inspires a cartoonishly disturbed recreation of a failed date – its bleakness and ridiculousness combined in one swift, crazed overreaction. Always seeking to involve the audience at every turn, Mace's overall tone is stupidity for stupidity's sake, pricked with occasional darkness. But the dementedly joyous finale, inflatables bouncing around the room to a rousing singalong, firmly leaves you recalling the former.