Simon Munnery was quick to point out that the title of his stand-up show wasn’t to be taken literally: he was singing the praises of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, not setting his words to music.

As he said, Kierkegaard wasn’t known for his jokes – if he had been, they would have been along the lines of: “What’s the difference between an elephant and a post box? Nothing, they’re both ideas, not actual elephants or post boxes.”

In the hands of a lesser talent this kind of gag could only fall flat, but Munnery was a comic of such brilliant and endearing talent that even this unlikely kind of material could be made funny.

Dropping crumpled notes and books of the philosopher’s works on the stage as he sought to excavate jokes from his memory of the show’s Edinburgh performances last year, Munnery was able to bring the irony of David Cameron’s love of The Jam’s song The Eton Rifles together with anecdotes about killing a mouse in the kitchen of his anarchist landlady’s kitchen and his baby daughter being kicked in the face.

He strung these entire semi-improvised routines together with mutterings of Kierkegaard’s opinions of the “present age”.