Milton's Paradise Jones

Leicester Cathedral 3 / 5 stars
Milton Jones at Edinburgh festival
Milton Jones. Photograph: David Levene

And on the seventh day (of the Leicester Comedy festival), God accommodated laughter. But the scene was more Dickensian than Biblical on Thursday night, as snow fell on the cobbles of ye olde Leicester, and punters sploshed through the slush to hear the Word according to Milton Jones. This was the first comedy gig in the city's cathedral and one of the flagship events of the city's 16th annual gags bonanza. Jones, doyen of Radio 4 and ex-Perrier champ, is a Christian to whom this engagement must be as exciting as it would be for Frank Skinner were he invited to play for West Brom, or for Russell Brand to be booked to perform in front of a mirror.

But what is it with Christians and one-liners? The other prominent holy-rollin' comic is Tim Vine - like Jones, a dispenser of small but deftly formed wordplays that turn the world upside-down in two sentences or less. I suppose the devout worldview precludes putting-the-world-to-rights comedy (after all, that's God's job). Perhaps it's that prolonged exposure to the Bible engenders a facility with gnomic utterances. At any rate, godly gag-men tend not to publicise their piety to an irreverent comedy world.

But there is something inspired (divinely or otherwise) about Jones's one-liners. He's Britain's Emo Phillips - or Demetri Martin without the maths. Listening to him, the English language reveals unsuspected depths of ambiguity and imprecision. "My wife and I recently bought a box set of Doctor Who, and watched them back to back. Unfortunately, I wasn't the one facing the screen." Figures of speech are taken at face value: "Farmers, they use a lot of heroin. Mind you, finding the evidence is like … " - and the punchline delivers itself. Puns are deployed with merciless economy. "1945. Warsaw pact. Peterborough empty."

The latter comes from a sequence in which Jones, reading augustly from some dusty old tome, recites made-up events from history. Elsewhere, there are doodles on a flipchart ("This is me with the band REM. That's me in the corner … ") and the occasional prop. These break the monotony of the one-liner attack, but don't entirely solve the innate problem with Jones' shtick, which is that the returns diminish rather than intensify as the shows goes on. I think he knows that; he alludes to audiences' desire to get to know the man behind the jokes - but only as a setup to another joke. He rolls his eyes and fluffs up his big hair, investing the gags with as much otherworldly personality as they can bear.

But if the show's repetitive rhythm proves insurmountable, there's consolation in the quality of (most of) the quips. These are jack-in-the-boxes of wordplay; Jones is a linguistic toymaker, a Geppetto of mirth. As his act is interrupted by the pealing of bells in the belfry above us, it's tempting to imagine that God Himself is amused. At any rate, if church provided this kind of uplift, the pews would be fuller on Sunday morning.

Most popular