As one of the more cautious comics resuming touring after the coronavirus lockdown, Jon Richardson’s The Knitwit (the title a play on his fusty, cardigan-wearing persona) has been a long time coming. And the postponement, all that time to worry and stew, doesn’t seem to have served him well. Having just turned 40 and been too self-inhibited to undergo a proper mid-life crisis, he’s instead diverted his focus into an attritional battle with his wife, fellow comic Lucy Beaumont, for their six-year-old daughter’s soul.

Projecting into the future, Richardson foresees his child stumbling across clips of her father and being distinctly unimpressed. Much of the first half recalls this most beta male of comic’s humiliation on panel shows, in successive physical contests with sporting icons like Freddie Flintoff and Jamie Redknapp. However, just as The Knitwit threatens to settle into a predictable rut, Richardson unveils what he’s been building to, the tale of his unlikely sexual awakening.

^{Pictures: Andy Hollingworth}

Giving ample expression to the hunched, gremlin-like stance and nasal voice he adopts at moments of his greatest self-abasement, this tale of furtive, adolescent horniness is nevertheless framed in a manner that’s essentially, and weirdly, sex positive, a precursor to him triumphing over one of his sporting tormentors. Moreover, with the second half of the show largely dedicated to Richardson confessing an intimate medical problem, he gives himself a fully earned pat on the back that, rather than indulge in pretension after so long away from stand-up, he’s instead crafted a show about two highly embarrassing, intensely personal incidents and wrung them hard for crowd-pleasing laughs.

All of which would be sufficient entertainment. But he also delivers some wickedly funny running gags on the hitherto unseen dark heart of David Attenborough. And the portrait of his marriage to Beaumont is absurdly heightened in its strained tension and his pernickety frustrations. But it’s so relatable that you find yourself transposing your own relationship and that of other couples you know onto theirs’, and picking sides. Long may he suffer, though not in silence.

Jon Richardson: The Knitwit tours until Saturday 20 January; reviewed at King’s Theatre, Glasgow.