Comedians come in all shapes and sizes – stadium fillers, TV favourites, traditionalists, controversialists, introverts, deadpanners, sweary Marys, one-line kings, prop aficionados, alternatives, characters and surrealists – and then there’s John Kearns.

The Edinburgh-award laden – in fact the only two-time Edinburgh Comedy Award Winner – doesn’t fit into any conventional category and orbits around his own weird world.

That’s he’s now been a professional comedian for 12 years now and yet remains largely unknown to the customary man on the Clapham omnibus is odd, although to be fair that analogy is probably a little off-key since Tooting where Kearns was born is a near neighbour of Clapham so the likelihood is that this particular bus dweller would actually know Kearns. The Boscombe omnibus may be somewhat different.

Suffice to say he has gained a whole new audience since participating in in Taskmaster 14 last October, alongside the likes of Sarah Millican and Dara Ơ Briain, yet as he says cryptically, this means ‘sales are up, laughs are down’. Meaning people only come to live shows because he’s been on the telly, which is fair comment but didn’t seem to be the case tonight.

A shortish, stoutish man, Kearns, 35, ambled on to the Sherling Studio’s intimate stage, otherwise known as the floor, rolled up his white shirt sleeves, donned his Max Wall wig, stuck in the false teeth and got on with the show.

Suffice to say, it rambled, tangented, went up avenues, came back down avenues, found itself it cul-de-sacs, was shouty, sweaty, ranty and also introspective, occasionally touching and full of pauses.

It came out like a stream of consciousness, cutting across diverse subjects and seemingly being unscripted and made up on the hoof. There is an innate skill in giving a performance like this – structuring such chaos must take hours of rehearsal.

Indeed, I suspect an hour later most audience members wouldn’t be able to recall what he was talking about but were laughing throughout at the sheer madness of it all.

I was making notes. Thus, I can safely say that anyone who can fit in Michael Heseltine, Neil Diamond, Jermaine Jenas, David Gray, Gandhi, Jack Straw, Iris Murdoch, Marco-Pierre White and Simon Rimmer into a 75-minute performance has my backing.

Kearns, once a Houses of Parliament tour guide, is definitely in character, ‘suburban stand-up’ as someone else once said, with a perfect understanding of the human condition.

What did we learn? That this was gig 29 out of 84 of The Varnishing Days tour, that Kearns is 35, has a one-year-old son and lives in a London flat. He has done some TV other than Taskmaster – such as being Sarah Pascoe’s assistant on Guessable, being on Sunday Brunch and once in Dictionary Corner on 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown – and would like to do more as that’s where the money is.

He likes going to art galleries, loves Van Gogh’s sunflowers, drifts off when changing his baby’s nappy and likes to walk with a tea towel over his shoulder. The swinging wine bottle routine remains the funniest, but you really had to be there.

And you can be. If you missed this sell-out show, don’t despair – Kearns is back at the same venue on October 20.

Support came from Joz Norris, who was at the University of East Anglia at the same time as Kearns and whose prime laugh came from the fact he performed in white Y-fronts.

Sounding vaguely like Jack Whitehall, he had one joke, a disco- band Chic-based effort, tried a magic trick and mused about having all his bones removed and eating a sausage baguette containing no sausage.