Middle-class mediocrity is a well-worn topic at the Fringe, but few tackle it with as much relish and originality as Sean McLoughlin. Inhabiting the role of a down-on-his-luck comic watching his professional peers race ahead of him, this thoughtful stand-up’s observations on Google, horse ownership and politics are laden with self-loathing. In a playful hour enlivened by McLoughlin’s undercurrent of anger, seemingly simple observations are teased to breaking point, as when a discussion of China’s state surveillance devolves into a discussion between him and his Huawei phone.

Unlike his more introspective peers, McLoughlin’s not all that interested in discussing his personal life, instead taking his foibles and attaching them to paranoias about the wider world. Even his marriage to a Canadian becomes a Kafkaesque well of bureaucracy and invasion of privacy when he’s forced to prove he’s not in a green-card marriage.

If all this sounds a bit heavy, the very opposite is the case. Every self-deprecating anecdote in McLoughlin’s arsenal is loaded with pithy one-liners, easy-going interactions with his audience and digressions that are machine-tooled to cram in as many gags as possible. This is a masterclass in wordplay and imagination. We caught McLoughlin on an off-night, a migraine threatening to cancel the gig entirely, but even at half-capacity this was A-grade material about the blemishes of an ordinary man turning the banality of life into cracking comic fodder.

Reviewed at Pleasance Courtyard as part of Edinburgh Fringe.