DOES York collectively have the weakest bladder in Britain or is the constant flow to the ladies and gents the result of exposure to Ross Noble's humour of the stream-of-consciousness variety?

Short of a medical emergency, it was once considered rude to a performer to leave a show, and frankly it's gone beyond a joke now, taking the you know what, but Noble is such a charmer, such a ready improviser, that he weaved the distractions brilliantly into Thursday's typically off-the-cuff, off-the-wall show. So much so, he turned the caught-short miscreants into instant material.

Tangentleman, so named for Noble's propensity to go off on myriad tangents, is the very opposite of sat-nav comedy.

It has no idea where it's going, what route it will take, what hold-ups it might experience (in this case the constant exits) or what its final destination will be. That sounds like the state of modern politics, but Noble is not an overt observational comedian so much as an absurdist, a surrealist, suitably dressed in banana-yellow trainers and pantomime silly-billy clothing.

If he does stray into the political minefield, it is to make a rhyming link between ebola and tombola, or to connect ISIS with choc ices and to advocate giving ISIS a dishwater because a dishwater cycle – have you switched it on or not? – introduces uncertainty where previously the radical perpetrators had no doubt. He is not belittling or trivialising issues, so much as pointing out the absurdities of extremism.

By the end of the night, Noble's tangentlemanly meanderings have taken him to "John Craven's Sex Bunker", encounters with a Latino owl with a French accent and gay monk bars in York, ending him with rapidly reprising the entire show in the guise of the original, grunting Neanderthal comedian.

"I'm not going to lie to you," he says. "Tonight has been a bit weirder than normal." Maybe so, but there's every chance that Friday would be weirder still.