IN his great hymn to depression Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now Morrissey sings about his fleeting attempts to find joy only discovering they bring more pain.

From the “haze of a drunken hour” to the search for employment they all bring misery – and it is that concept which is at the heart of Bill Jones’s show.

“I like to think Morrissey hangs over this show as a benign spirit,” he says.

“There is something bracing about misery. There is so much false optimism around at the moment people like to have an hour to wallow.”

Jones plays Miserable Malcolm, a poet and member of Melancholics Anonymous, who is trying to get over the loss of his one true love Mavis through poetry.

“You get an underlying sense that they were miserable together,” says Jones. “But now she’s really happy with someone else, which makes it even worse.

“She has a new boyfriend called Dave, and in his poetry he keeps coming back to rhymes with Dave. He can’t move on.”

The show began in Jones’s native Stroud as a downbeat character who wrote poems and bleak, but hilarious, cartoons as collected on his blog www.hawkerspot.com

“It’s about existential angst,” says Jones. “I was really inspired by a line from an Ivor Cutler record: ‘The worst thing about being dead is you can no longer say I wish I was dead.’ I find it so funny every time I hear it.”

Just as comedy is tragedy plus time – making our own teenage diaries so hilarious years later – there is also something funny about unrelenting misery.

“Part of the piece is that he thinks he’s being positive and things are looking up,” says Jones. “He’s trying things like Melancholics Anonymous – basically a group of guys getting together to be thoroughly miserable – but from the outside you can see it’s not going to help.”

In his native Stroud Jones has launched a Miserable Poets Cafe, with guests coming in to read their own downbeat poetry, frequently drawn from their teenage selves.

“With this show there is an element of revisiting my earlier more miserable self,” says Jones. “There is an element that this character really hasn’t got much to complain about.”

And this Fringe show is part of a national tour to the most upbeat places in the country to bring them down a peg or two.

“In these difficult times we have this absurd culture of happiness,” says Jones.

“People are embarrassed to admit they are down and depressed about things. This is doing something counter to that. You have got to embrace the negative sometimes.”

Brighton Fringe: Graveside Manner Otherplace At The Basement: The Pit, Kensington Street, Sunday, May 17, Saturday, May 30, and Sunday, May 31