Wilton's Music Hall in London's still-shabby East End has always felt like a magical venue and in the last 15 months I've seen three truly magical shows there. Harry Hill, Tim Key and now the third in this triptych of three-in-a-million unique performers, John Kearns, who combines the vaudevillian sensibility of Hill with the poetic precision of Key. 

 

The former Parliament tour guide's new show Tilting at Windmills is essentially the latest bulletin from his life, delivered – apart from briefly early on – while wearing his trademark shonky teeth and monk's tonsure. Life has not been running smoothly for Kearns since we last encountered him. He has split from his long-term partner and, pushing forty, had to move back in with his parents. 

 

The performance is a series of interlinked anecdotes, sometimes told in conversational tones, sometimes belted out in despairing mock fury, with shades of late fire and brimstone stand-up Sam Kinison. His last show, The Varnishing Days, homed in on his hopes and fears of parenthood and had more sentimentality and tenderness. Here the tone is bleaker and sadder, full of frustration at the slings and arrows life has hurled at him. Plus a peppering of light misanthropy.

 

Fans who only know Kearns from Taskmaster might be initially taken aback, but there is plenty to relish in his self-deprecating assessment of the human condition and stories of estate agents that he only ever meets in different rooms. Words and images are eloquently chosen. A casual aside mentioning a split open bag of McCoy's crisps evokes an entire landscape portrait.

 

There are a number of pokes at famous names. A swipe at journalist Rod Liddle suggesting that you have failed in life if your washing machine is in your kitchen prompts a roar of approval. Another anecdote recalls a meeting with Tony Blair, who turned up to a play Kearns was in when he was young with his security team in tow.

 

There are references to TS Eliot's The Waste Land, while recordings of Alec Guinness punctuate the performance. This is not quite stand-up, not quite theatre. It occupies the same genre-defying liminal – yes I did say liminal – space as some of Daniel Kitson's work. But Kearns is never too stagey and always compelling. He's the ultimate consummate clown, squeezing out every possible droplet of comedy from personal tragedy.