Her new show may be a paean to the pleasures and perils of singledom, but Joanne McNally doesn’t want for parasocial connection, attracting an enthusiastic, overwhelmingly female audience, cheering as she salutes them with her raised wine glass. The Irish comic has built a fiercely devoted fanbase from her conversational podcast with Vogue Williams, and she rewards its sisterly embrace with a self-laceratingly frank but breezily upbeat status report on just where she is in her life.

Despite ultimately sharing some guarded but archly funny disclosures of the infidelity that killed her last relationship and the icks that torpedoed another before it had properly begun, Pinotphile is framed as universally relatable. McNally might have gone harder than most in her boozing and pill-popping 20s, recreating the shape-throwing and blissed-out spaceiness in vivid act-outs. But as a single, childless woman of 42, she’s rejecting regressive stereotyping, eschewing owning a cat and suggesting that she’s living her best life dining out and holidaying alone, even if the strain occasionally tells.

Returning time and again to the metaphor of her left stranded on a dock as her friends’ boats depart for domestic coupledom and motherhood, she’s not pretending hers is an ideal situation. Back on the dating scene, she’s incredulous at the low quality of man she attracts. But her underlying message is that it’s fine for the menopause to encroach while you’re still single, with upsides and emancipation in it. Even when she’s dancing around her mental-health wobbles, the animated and expressive McNally is masterfully assured and carries the crowd in the palm of her hand. A routine about the terrible online shopping decisions made by Drunk Joanne is not the most distinctive. But it’s a rare so-so section in a show that otherwise overflows with entertaining, hard-won authenticity and the dryly witty honesty of her storytelling.

Joanne McNally: Pinotphile is on tour until Sunday 8 February; reviewed at King’s Theatre, Glasgow; picture: Matt Crockett.