Have you ever pretended a banana was a gun? What about a penis? How about the nails that were hammered into Jesus’ hands while he was tortured on a crucifix? Or perhaps you’ve used one as a phallic prop to re-enact Lady And The Tramp? Too far? Not for Bill O’Neill. He’s moulded a masterpiece from imagining a banana into a thousand oddball permutations and added in the simple slapstick joy of slipping on their peels.

In The Amazing Banana Brothers, you’re invited to watch chaotically drunk circus performer Kevin Calamity as he promises to slip on 1000 banana peels or your money back. But when his timid brother Joey is forced to step into his shoes and complete Kevin’s act, this race to slip as much as possible devolves into an anarchic ride through the combative nature of brotherly love and the troubling side of masculinity.

O’Neill’s gift for controlled chaos is an almost instantly freeing experience, forcible and overbearing though it is, seducing you into his potassium-laden grotesquerie with incredible ease. Despite the age-old punchline of slipping on a banana peel, none of these jokes are even close to traditional, veering into unrelenting acts of cartoon violence, boundary-pushing interactions with his audience or mime as a form of misguided therapy for his damaged protagonists.

O’Neill has built a comedy duo that are idiosyncratic, but they never keep the audience at a distance. Instead, he pulls them as closely as possible to his textured characters, even if he has to literally bellow at members of the front row to do it, creating a genuine desire to see that thousandth-slip pay-off. Who’d have guessed a man pratfalling on slippery fruit could manage all that?

Bill O’Neill: The Amazing Banana Brothers, Pleasance Courtyard, until 27 August, 10pm.