Famously, Van Gogh remained undiscovered in his lifetime. And despite being a double Edinburgh Comedy Award winner, John Kearns rubs his beard and wheezily conveys wistfulness for such obscurity. He retains an old-fashioned respect for the business of showbusiness and takes a workmanlike pride in being 'an act, a turn'. But it's the artistry, not the trappings of fame he venerates. 

With his soulful, pained expressions and plangent outbursts, his persona suggests a man accepting of a quiet, humdrum existence, just steadily chipping away, layering on his jokes, if only he can be transported occasionally by the poetic sublimity of a Dutch Old Master, the romantic flight of an acrobat or his fantasy of resting on the laurels of his bustling family restaurant.

Two things have happened to disturb such lyrical reveries: his appearance on Taskmaster and fatherhood. Taskmaster has greatly boosted Kearns' profile and tour sales. Now, plenty of stand-ups make great play of the difference between their live act and the television jobs that brought them to wider public attention, complaining with varying degrees of genuine feeling that new audiences won't appreciate their edginess or sophistication. But for Kearns, the disparity between his various selves has prompted a full-blown, existential wobble. 

The picture he paints at the start of The Varnishing Days, of bewilderedly promoting himself on the publicity circuit, highlighting the mad artificiality of Sunday Brunch and The One Show while remaining a detached, incredulous observer, is uproariously funny. Like Marco Pierre White, the precociously talented chef he feels a kinship with and whose repertoire he's absorbed to an extent (mindset as much as potato recipe), Kearns now has a reputation to protect. Such oppression brings out the best in him, as he packs this show with typically thoughtful musings on what makes a life well-lived in the trying circumstances of the everyday, though invariably from oblique, surprising and delightful angles.

Kearns is also besieged from within. Father to a one-year-old son, he's scrambling. Unpredictable as only children can be, the battle of wits is entertaining but it has focused his thoughts on what's been passed to him from his father and what he hands on to his offspring. The mock-heroic portrait of himself that he suggests for shaping such a tiny mind is pathetically endearing but the import feels weighty and real. 

Most strikingly, Kearns addresses the tonsured monk's wig and buck teeth that are his trademark stage costume and imagines trying to justify them to his son, burnishing his own mythology even as he presents himself at his most foolish. This is yet another superb hour from a gifted writer and performer, suffused with beauty, tenderness and frequent, exceptional hilarity.

John Kearns: The Varnishing Days is on tour until Friday 24 November.