It is impossible to pin down reasons for Ross Noble’s success. He looks like a hairy demonic scarecrow.

He lopes inconsequentially across the stage while never completing sentences or thought processes.

He doesn’t tell jokes as such and plays on all these non-attributes by stopping every now and then, staring at the audience and assuming that we’re saying “Now that’s really weird.”

That’s it! Noble is weird. He explains himself quickly: “If you don’t like tangents, then f*** off.” He is the most tangential of comedians and it is part of his excellence that you simply cannot see where the joins are. For he must, surely, come on stage with some prepared material, around which to weave his surreal outpourings. I think he was always intending to attack the Pope viciously and Duncan Bannatyne of Dragon’s Den. But his randomness is quite astonishing.

Thus, within a couple of minutes of spotting someone in the New Theatre’s front row with their feet up on a railing, Noble had introduced us to the concepts of “zebra beavers trained to leap at plimsolls” and “Nazi nuns you don’t know are Nazis because their marching is hidden”. Somehow within the next half-hour, he reached the concept of Lady Gaga in papier mâché legs via the Swiss people being neutral about muesli.

It’s exhausting just recalling his imagery. After the interval, there was an extended riff on doing a poo, much fun with an inflatable octopus (the only physical slapstick of the evening) and rudeness about mobile phones (how a reversible mermaid got involved in this bit of silliness, I can’t remember, but it’s there in my notes!).

I haven’t seen the film Avatar, but I probably don’t need to now that Noble has told me it involves “a big blue cat-smurph-monkey in 3-D”; there were few in the audience who disagreed with his assertion that Premiership footballers are “overpaid, tax-avoiding rapists”.

That’s Ross Noble. Weird. But wonderfully entertaining.