If everyone else is shouting. Photo by Brenda Romans.

Comedians who are so bad they’re good have been a deconstructive force in the game ever since Tommy Cooper made lumbering panic feel like seamless perfectionism, or Andy Kaufman begged an audience to consider his family’s feelings.  And while not in their league, Adam Riches is bad, make no mistake about it.  Whether he’s bellowing “I’m Daniel Day Lewis” in a deeply unconvincing accent, standing on the wrong side of an inflatable dinghy that’s been catapulted over the audience’s heads, making low rent props conjure bathetic moments of madness, or failing at a game of Mastermind – there is a deeply ramshackle attack on the competent comic.   And yet unlike Kaufman who destabilised the stand-up format so far it became folk art, or Cooper who flirtatiously celebrated failure with a nod and wink, Riches has come out the other side.  His beaming hi-NRG show is propelled by a furious will to invest awfulness with a demented brand of sincerity, it is a masterclass in bathos, and the worse it all happens – so much the better.

Largely unchanged from the brightly coloured anarchy that won the Fosters prize at last year’s Edinburgh fringe, Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches is ostensibly a set of five characters, and yet it is the character of Riches – a furious ball of Kitsch with ridiculous entropic limbs who sounds in the main like someone loudly satirising the acting of Pierce Brosnan – that dominates the evening. Ian Dustry who wants to ‘sign-up’ everything, flings his business card at the wall; A Latin swingball champion with a sweatband made from the hamstrings of children; a Bond villain with a dribbling colostomy bag.  These grotesques are  conveyed in single-note performance so doggedly monophonic, with a cardiac-troubling tempo, that it swiftly becomes a self-parodic rush. Expertly tripping over props, you could see Riches instead as a perennially-aggravated stunt comedian, a Carrot Top with a volcanic attitude.  But this voice and persona, with its overtones of bellowing upper-class idiot (an accent borrowed from the Adam Buxton vault of angry semi-detached men) contain a wide-eyed lunacy that is wholly British: think the overreaching, underachieving sense of ignominy of an Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, or the perfectly inane optimism of a Frank Sidebottom.

But what cements all of this slapdash cacophony is his relationship with punters, and the way those he drags ontsage become architecturally implicated.  They fail to heave him into the audience by his arms and legs, they race lying flat on sidekicks in lizard costumes, they hold swingball poles in haircut-splitting proximity to the rows behind them, creating a multinodal display reminiscent of some rickety village Olympics.  This mock tempestuous relationship with his audience is central to Riches’ appeal. He creates an immediate space of participatory safety and consent that straighter theatre works harder to achieve. Awkwardness is swept away by the torrent of already-deflected abuse, and trust is established before being admixed with an, albeit contrived, sense of danger.

As Colin Bramwell noted on these pages from Edinburgh last year, Riches is a rare in his supreme confidence to allow those he drags on stage to be funny in their own right.  Whether a London theatre audience is quite up to the task is another question, even the hip Soho crowd.  When asked to name his racing lizard, a man in expensive shoes plumped for “Charles”.  The same man, when asked by the panting Riches what he’d learned from the experience, replied “never go to another comedy gig”.  However much Riches might dovetail with a new breed of constructive comic, whether he’s innovative enough in his showmanship to satisfy theatre, or belongs more properly to the ramshackle gangways of the circuit, is still up for bellowing debate.