^{Picture: Matt Crockett}

There’s no polite way to put this, but Jordan Brookes has a hilariously weird face. His round and hairless bonce mixes the gormless middle-class manner of Robert Webb with the elastic mania of Rik Mayall, a side order of barely concealed neuroses cartoonishly embedded in his eyes. With the demeanour of a man aiming to win the World Gurning Championships 2022, Brookes can twist his dynamic visage with the grace of an acrobat, contorting his face into strange emotional extremes like a one-man retrospective of Picasso’s Cubist period. 

Even without this Edinburgh Comedy Award winner’s natural-born talents, comedy gold is on offer in his latest show This Is Just What Happens. This incredible hour finds the anxiety-ridden comic doing his best to be a nicer person while openly seething about being called a ‘slimeball’ at a party the year before. The stakes are low, then, but they open the floodgates to a therapy session’s worth of quibbles, minor upsets and worries, painting a picture of a man desperate to fit in but unable to figure out how. 

Sharing a kinship with the alternative comedy scene, this chaotic oddball is at his best when he’s mangling turns of phrase or moving around the stage in curious, awkward fashion, like a ballet dancer too wallflowerish to commit to their performance. Yet mastery here lies in Brookes’ balance of self-loathing, misplaced confidence and sublime lack of self-awareness. Few performances are as deft at striking that chord, but this machine-tooled barrage of silliness has it down to an absolute tee. 

Monkey Barrel Comedy, until 28 August, 9.55pm.