Audiences come to Milton Jones for one thing, and that’s puns: loopy, mind-scrambling wordplays that make language suddenly seem weird and rich with possibility. But his new show offers more besides, stringing together those one-liners into a dotty narrative in which Jones flies to a desert island seeking the treasure that will help resurrect his archaeology career.
The story is led solely by Jones’s gags and has minimal life of its own, but it makes an enjoyable change from the usual battery of non-sequiturs, and – demonstrating that Jones can stitch together an entire playlet from puns alone – feels like an even greater feat of virtuosity than the shock-haired comic’s previous shows.
At one point early in tonight’s tale (loosely modelled on those of Jones’s namesake Indiana) there’s a gag about a woman who uses so much concealer, she disappears. The story itself is likewise vanishingly thin. Told alternately by Jones and his fake-beardie uncle Randolph, it embroils our hero in a dastardly tropical plan (don’t ask me about the specifics) hatched by castaway teachers from his old school.
Sometimes, the show falls between two stools: Jones keeps the narrative at arm’s length, while one or two jokes (perhaps because they’re obliged to do a story job as well as a wordplay job) aren’t as haiku-perfect as usual. But there are still abundant beautiful one-liners, so skilfully sculpted you don’t know whether to laugh or put them on your mantelpiece. The one about the biography of the man who invented Sellotape; the one about Holby City; the one about “coming from a family of failed magicians: I’ve got two half-sisters.”
The story’s a bonus, but it’s these jokes – and the dizzying thought of how much time and spadework Jones must devote to extreme lateral thinking – that yield the real treasure.
• New Wimbledon theatre (08448 717 646), 3 March, then touring.
