Eastern promise meets Carry On. Mawaan Rizwan, whose sketches on Youtube have reached over 20 million views, emerges from behind the curtain with clothespegs attached to each finger like fake nail talons, wriggles seductively to Thai restaurant muzac, and proceeds to try, using the pegs, to pick popcorn out of a bag, throw it unsuccessfully into his own mouth and eventually the mouths of audience members. Stupidity doesn’t come much sillier or funnier than this.

Mawaan remains in traditional clown silence for the first half, miming out more and more ridiculous acts: pulling pints, given to any willing audience member, on repeat to the point of despairing hysterics; drawing portraits of audience members that end up being a cow; and shimmying, wide eyed, to slithering music in his flowing tiedye kaftan. I am immediately enamoured. So open and warm is this clown, responsive, and stupid, that we can’t help laughing out loud at his endeavours to essentially do nothing.

At some point a microphone emerges and Mawaan has to stand on a small stepladder to reach it. We finally hear his voice. There is a niggling part of me that feels slightly disappointed at this, perhaps because it returns the piece to a more traditional stand up comedy form, perhaps because I am so fond of the miscommunication and over-use of Mawaan’s expressive eyes that the silence creates. The disappointment doesn’t last long, though. Elaborately bad, nonsensical jokes and mad hat game shows are fired out. My personal favourite act of the ‘mergician’ sees our clown take two words from the audience ‘banana’ and ‘sandwich’ mergiced into a ‘bananwich’. Quite simply, I love this. Perhaps there is room for a return to more of the mimed silence, although I question if this is possible once the audience has discovered that the clown can speak, perhaps something to be explored, and I have faith in the unique ability of this performer to make anything possible.

There is a real renaissance of live clown as a form at the moment, and it’s intriguing to see this performance cross out from ‘new’ media into ‘old’ – working with a live audience being clown’s natural home. Stupid and ridiculous as it may seem, to do clown well takes real skill, openness and generosity. Only with a willingness to be a complete failure can it really succeed. And Mawaan succeeds with zeal: he gives space to his jokes, has the confidence to wait for a laugh and remains endearingly present and open throughout these 45 minutes of heartwarming silly joy. This is masterful and supremely hilarious stupidity delivered by a very clever clown.