This bubbly and upbeat Canadian (you can tell from the baseball cap) brings us an hour of high-energy camp comedy that has his audience howling. Having appeared on America’s Got Talent, the LA-based comedian sheds some light on life in the US including 2020 covid chaos, drink driving and the time he hit a pig with his car (the animal, not the derogatory term for a police officer).

Hastings’ comedy hour starts off slow (he admits he thought us, his audience, uptight at first). But his theatrical delivery and over-the-top punchlines have every audience member in bits by the end of his performance. Some crafty crowd work which he unashamedly calls back on several times throughout gives his material the correct momentum to keep his audience increasingly invested. In short, the longer you watch him, the funnier he gets.

In this basement, armed with a misshapen microphone, the Canadian yells out the ground-level window at passersby, commanding them to quiet down because ‘ART IS HAPPENING’. He recounts stories of his recent divorce, which ended in him having a full-blown panic attack in a woman that he’d just met on a dating app’s shed. His stories are perhaps not relatable to all of us, but they’re definitely funny. It’s no doubt John Hastings will gain some well-deserved traction from his newest Fringe hour.

John Hastings: The Times They Are A John Hastings, Monkey Barrel, until 27 August, 8.35pm.