Pierre Novellie: You Sit There, I’ll Stand Here – The Stand, Glasgow

Pierre Novellie has experienced some significant life changes since his last show, having married and moved across London from a fraught, high rise flat to a house in a more genteel suburb. Yet in a professional capacity it’s business as usual for the South African-born Manxman, with his latest show comprised of lucidly witty observations, leading up to the distilled trauma of making the big move.

Having hit 35, Novellie is acutely aware of the dangers of accepting the mind and hobby set of an eccentric dad. He’s a special case however, having come to his interest in early 20th century warfare long before the possibility of fatherhood was even on the horizon.

He’s also autistic, with the way in which he expresses himself liable to upset the deeply coded balance of middle-class civility he perceives in his new community. That’s certainly true if tensions with the publisher of his book about autism are any indication.

Mostly though, he’s guarding against the fustier, more right-wing opinions that he feels creeping over him, which he personifies as “The Colonel”. It’s this blimpish character that harrumphs to the fore when he finds himself at close quarters with petty criminality, compelled to intervene by a straightforward sense of right and wrong, but with an insidious sense of something less palatable lurking beneath his minimal vigilantism.

These feelings aren’t just coming from him however, because external factors are at play. Lamenting a harder working environment for observational comics these days, he makes the salient if familiar point that in an era when endless cultural amusements are spread across countless micro-audiences, it’s that much harder to find shared references that an entire crowd understands. Poking at class identity by conflating The Traitors and Love Island goes some way towards bridging that.

If these are his gut, Colonel inklings, he’s more empirical charting the decline of the UK through its town centres and economy. As a touring stand-up, he’s, returning to the same places year after to find them just that little bit incrementally shitter.

In sum, this is bit is a downer. But in the damning details, eruditely expressed, there’s no reason to shoot the messenger, as he’s careful to bulwark it with humour. It also serves to set some low expectations for British humanity in the closing tale of Novellie trying to move all of his and his partner’s worldly possessions through London to their new home.

Without wishing to spoil the retelling, it’s worth noting that this nightmarish odyssey taps into his perennial issues with food once more, and it was a journey that he undertook on public transport, alone, and severely encumbered.

Crystallising his encroaching, middle-aged stubbornness and neurodiversity, one man’s journey through hell for negligible reward, his pained exasperation makes you truly feel it. It also recalls an earlier tale of the hulking comic’s reluctant adolescent status as the beast of ball-carrying burden in his school rugby team.

There’s an additional, cruel twist . But the denouement has an optimistic uplift, suggesting that the bleakness of one’s advancing years can and should be resisted.

Here, Novellie practices what he preaches. Harking back to the introductory stand-up of his earlier shows, in which he necessarily had to address his exotic name and background at practically every social interaction, his account of confounding expectations when he performs in Europe and patiently suffering well-meaning strangers’ attempts to connect with him, is a supremely polished, identity-based routine that gets the whole audience up to a similar speed.

Besides, when he embraces his penny pinching, mad dad side, taking on a well-meaning Melbourne hotel’s reward system that encourages its guests to be environmentally friendly, there’s perverse heroism in his commitment to slovenliness and determination to win at considerable self-cost.

Delivering high quality shows, year after year, it’s faint praise to acclaim Novellie for his consistency. But his steadily growing audiences are testament to it.