Time was that Jacob Hawley worried he was growing so successful as a laddish, working-class stand-up and authority on drugs that he was becoming middle-class, dull and detached from his roots. Then covid hit, gigs disappeared, and he found himself grasping for any sort of identity whatsoever, penning Grease-related gags for payment in fast food and pimping out his possessions online to perverts. The biggest destabilisation for him, though, was when his new girlfriend told him she was pregnant, fatherhood being almost inconceivable to someone who largely still perceives themselves as a rascally child.

^{Picture: Oli Bolland}

Expressive and upfront about his personal failings, Hawley overplays the arrested development shtick a little. But the jeopardy for him and his nascent family was, and is, real, his anxieties all-too relatable. His girlfriend is sketchily conveyed but he gets some strong laughs out of an Oedipal discomfort at her similarity to his mother, and how her occupation as a midwife places her on a moral footing above him, affording her licence to disrupt his artist’s lie-ins with painful, whispered home truths.

Class awareness remains one of Hawley’s strongest suits. And though there’s nothing too revelatory in his observations about how everyone tends to grow more right-wing as they age, he’s very funny on his own sudden shift to empathising with infamous burglar dispatcher, Tony Martin. There will doubtless be more bumps along the road for him, further shifts in perspective. But for now he’s adapting with scrambling good humour. 

Monkey Barrel The Hive, until 28 August, 1.25pm.