Tim Vine

Tim Vine's show is called Joke-­amotive, and at the Bloomsbury, it ­almost hit the buffers. His ­guitar ­cable was faulty and the sound ­technician was summoned to the stage. But Vine got the better of the breakdown, calmly ad-libbing his way to safety – and proving that there's more to this former world record-holding gag-teller than an airtight script of word-bending one-liners. That glimpse of the "real" Vine offered an intriguing counterpoint to the screwiness of his stage persona, which is hilarious, but gets hollow over the course of 75 minutes. One-liner after daft one-liner, it started to feel like a defence against self-revelation, or even meaning. By the second half, you noticed that not all of Vine's gags are high quality, and that some of his cheesy, Harry Hill-like absurdisms were thin. But, for the most part, Vine was just very funny. His show is a jacuzzi for the careworn, each joke a popping ­bubble of fun. You can sit back, relax and ­disengage from reality – unless (like me) you were diverted by the suppleness of ­language that his gleeful ­wordplay revealed: "The thief who is stealing T-shirts in order of size is still at large." The puns were punctuated with goofy visual gags and a sport that put Vine's lifelong joke archive in jeopardy called Don't Drop the Laptop. At his best, there was ­something heroic in his commitment to being silly: it's an act of ­generosity to turn one's ridiculousness into other people's entertainment. You may not go loco over the Joke-amotive, but it is a train worth catching.