If I were to be a stand-up comedian, I should like to be Milton Jones. I’d like to have a large audience — such as he had in the New Theatre on Sunday evening — in the palm of my hand, gurgling with constant delight at my outrageous and ingenious wordplay. I’d be perfectly happy that loud gales of laughter did not echo at obvious jibes at obvious targets; I’d just be pleased that the one-liners I had spent so much time constructing were greeted with intellectually knowing appreciation.

All right, Jones is not always working at an intellectual level: “I was walking along one day and someone threw some shampoo at me: turns out it was real poo.” Or: “If you like meths, you’re either an alcoholic or a South African addicted to numbers.” But he is adept at hitting you with the unexpected: “My sister was told to stop eating wheat; she said no and was run over by the combine harvester.”

He brilliantly wended his way from interest in genealogy to aubergenealogy and thus to the ‘St Valentine’s Day Moussaka’; we much enjoyed the fact that his posh friend needed help to pass a history exam and thus had his own private Tudor.

In a deadpan voice and challenging his audience to keep up, Jones has surprising stage presence as, with a vague smile playing about his lips, he hits his public with a barrage of excellence: “I see there’s a new deli in India”, “I love fairground food — candy floss, toffee apples . . . those boil-in-a-bag goldfish” or “My grandfather was a GI, he was in the RAF: OK, he was a giraffe.”

I leave you with a highlight of the night, thereby ruining perhaps the evening of December 1, when Milton Jones returns to Oxford. It perfectly sums up his surreal art. “‘Wolfgang Mozart,’ says Mozart’s friend. ‘What?’ replies Mozart. Then they are both eaten by a gang of wolves.”