"A FEW people look quite concerned", Paul Foot notes, looking into the audience at York.

Having made a lengthy off-stage announcement in a nasal drawl, minutes into the show Foot is still talking to the crowd with his head poked through the door. But while a bewildered minority of the sold-out audience seem cold to the left-field comedian's surrealist humour, the majority are soon roaring with laughter.

Finally making it to the stage, Foot gives us a swift and confusing run-down of what's to follow: first there will be "humour from the briefcase", followed by "thoughts from my mind" and then "humour from the basket", he said, vaguely outlining topics such as levels of homophobia and incompetent prostitutes.

Foot's take on the mundane is anything but. Discussing casual homophobia and racism at a Neighbourhood Watch garden party, Foot vividly invokes images of characters, focusing on small details and odd turns of phrase, becoming increasingly frenzied in his impressions of the boastful mother with a new conservatory and the gout-ridden man, who is not against homosexuality "unless it's rammed down my throat".

Frenetic rants are punctuated by absurd two-line short stories, or nine- word sentences read from hand-decorated prompt cards. "If you are not laughing, the mistake is you are searching for hidden meaning," Foot says wryly. The nonsensical tales of an asthmatic businessman doing deals in Switzerland and of a dejected guava salesman have the audience in hysterics.

While Foot's apparent preoccupation with structure and timing is made shambolic, carefully layered jokes instill a sense of self awareness in the audience, with which Foot often interacts. "Is there a gentleman in here who is heterosexual?", Foot asks, to resounding silence.

Selecting someone deemed suitably heterosexual, he asks "Ben, would you have sex with all the men in Britain if no-one would ever die?" In these moments you realise the crowd is completely in Foot's control.

In contrast to the slow beginning, it became a whirlwind of a show. It was a unique performance from a brilliant comedian.