A potted personal history for those freshly arrived at Stuart Mitchell via his popular online clips, Tips Not Included is a case study in eliciting humour from the bleakest subject matter. In comedy circles, maybe only Kelsey Grammer has led a life of greater tragedy and personal suffering than the Linlithgow native, who nevertheless shares his tales with affable ease and cheery bonhomie. That stories about him performing in Barlinnie Prison and making his screen debut as serial killer Bible John are among the most light-hearted fare here offers an indication of the darkness that Mitchell isn’t shy of laying upon a theatre.

Like Dave Allen, he’s had fun contriving made-up yarns about the missing parts of his fingers. The reality of the accident, of childhood play gone awry, has afforded him a visible physical legacy that’s been a pretty handy USP on the stand-up circuit. Initially, he seems to have otherwise emerged almost unscathed from the incident. But there’s a terrible kicker to the account, forcing us to speculate about the psychological damage that propels someone to seek audiences’ surrogate affection.

As his treading-water opening half of so-so crowd work indicates, Mitchell is instinctively personable, approaching middle-age but retaining a boy next door charm. And it’s that which carries him through a setlist that in blunt, bullet point form is a grim catalogue of grief, woe and medical trauma, yet which he crafts with so much more verve and optimism than you could credit, finding the silver linings. You’ll perhaps yearn for him to probe deeper into his anguish but the show’s draw is his cheeky, resilient wit and a soul-baring that, although cumulatively is scarcely conceivable, never once depresses.

Stuart Mitchell: Tips Not Included tours until Saturday 28 February; reviewed at Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow; picture: John Young.