"When I was at school I was great at history… oh wait, no I wasn't."

This is an older Stewart Francis joke, not one from his new show 'Pun Gent', but fans of such well-crafted lines would have found plenty to love at the Barbican on Friday night.

After the warmest of warm-ups by folksy comic support Allyson June Smith, also from Canada, the crowd were in a good mood. Her set was friendly and filthy, in equal measure.

Mr Francis himself came on stage in rockstar fashion. Dressed in an unassuming suit, he arrived with every Stewart Francis quality intact: the chiselled jaw, the charming smile, languid pose and Canadian friendliness.

And killer jokes. Like the other celebrated 'one line merchants' of our time such as Tim Vine and Milton Jones, Francis keeps a barrage of jokes coming for the full running time. Unlike them, however, he ventures into ever-so-slightly darker and weirder territory. At times his surreal non-sequiturs and paraprosdokians recall the greatest of them all, Steven Wright. It works.

His delivery is, as ever, desert-dry. Each joke becomes its own little vignette. Punchlines come and go like waves, sometimes overlapping, always precisely wrought.

Jokes are not allowed to linger - they are always followed up quickly by another gag, another layer, another smile. Sometimes, possibly, the speed at which things move on feels designed to mask the questionable quality of the pun, but more often the effect is cumulative.

The show gets more successful as it goes on. Callbacks to earlier lines amplify and improve them. Subtle repetition works wonders here: Francis knows precisely how far to take things. We audience members were on a string. He's been in the business for over 20 years, after all.

His experience also shows in the way he works the crowd. A slightly worse-for-wear man stood up at the end to try his own jokes on the punters. Francis used it to charm the crowd further, but a live edge had been injected into what might occasionally be a slick conveyor-belt of jokes.