Stuart Laws: So Preoccupied With Whether or Not He Could That He Didn't Stop to Think Whether He Should

Apparently Stuart Laws didn't stop to consider if "he should". Well if So Preoccupied... is the fruits of his hurried labour, then pausing to think is clearly a crutch he need no longer lean on. It's a brilliant semi-surrealist hour of standup that neatly incorporates all the tricks of the craft.

The wordy title (a surefire clincher for mainstream attention, he notes) isn't much of a giveaway for the content of the show; it's more of a showcase for facts about puffins than an expression of existential turmoil. Himself a keen ornithologist, Laws uses vignettes about the large-beaked bird as part of an ornately crafted callback structure. Artfully woven throughout are a series of recurrent lines, dropped innocuously at first but building to a collective climax. By the end he's set up so many lucrative buttons in our psyche that he just has to press them at will and he elicits instinctive laughter. It's a complex device that belies his languid, relaxed persona.

Thankfully, the absurdist humour of some segments manages to stay the right side of coherent, without straying into oddity for the sake of oddity. There's even a string of puns that might seem out of place elsewhere but feel at home in his variety showcase of the comic form. It's not quite polished, and he botches the delivery of a few punchlines, but his deceptive comedic turn keeps everyone on their toes. The expasperated musings of an eccentric aren't meant to be this funny.