Though a long-time advocate of mental-health openness, John Robins’ latest show of self-lacerating stand-up has been an even longer time coming. The 41-year-old began his relationship with alcohol aged just seven, and has only recently got sober, his journey to rock bottom at times difficult to hear. Mindful of this, he pre-empts Howl, an often bleak disclosure of his relationship with booze and struggles with anxiety with the wildly inappropriate blurt of a fan at a previous performance, just as he was sharing his lowest ebb.

At once reassuring that this nakedly personal and assuredly measured account will wrest comedy from despair (which it consistently does as Robins dissects his destructive thoughts, his knowing wit laced with wry, hard-earned wisdom), it also introduces his consoling idea that striving for happiness is doomed to fail. Instead, we should aim for stoic acceptance and gratitude for what we have.

All of which sounds pretty heavy. Yet Robins suggests that the straw which broke the camel’s back of his breakdown was his inability to purchase a slotted spoon, the triviality of this exercise making light of his deeper internal conflicts. Similar tales of angst over condiment storage and a lack of civility on a crowded train contrast surface level inconsequentiality with the turmoil they prompt in him, the comic tending to show not tell, confident in (most of) his audience’s empathy. Even when he passionately defends the beleaguered NHS, it’s in the service of a blunt barb at his own lack of self-awareness.

The lyrical descriptions of his relationship with alcohol also seem designed to evoke a contrast between his doomed artist egotism and his pernickety, uptight reality when sober. One particular act-out, in which he tries to convince his ex-fiancée’s mother to change her kitchen lighting with craven, excessive politeness, relies on some beautifully subtle physicality. Not for the first time, Robins expresses his roiling emotions with economic precision, eliciting big laughs through tortured grimaces and twitches.

John Robins: Howl tours until Friday 15 December; reviewed at Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow.