If you’re a comedy consumer who loves clowning, and you come across a clown show that doesn’t hit the spot, it can be hard to explain what’s happening. Why does one hour of silliness reduce me to tears while this other hour of silliness misses the mark so widely? It feels like we lack a vocabulary for talking about nonsense.

Paul Currie is having a good festival, pulling in big crowds, possible awards attention, and a Pick Of The Fringe recommendation from Stewart Lee. It’s easy to see why his act stands out; this is Harry Hill as performed by a maximum-security inmate. 

You could see Hill pulling off Currie’s ‘panda hands’ song,  in which he dances around with pandas on his hands. But only Currie could give it such an imposing ferocity, screaming the words from beneath long hair and a beard, stomping around in an orange boiler suit and heavy boots. 

The other thing Harry Hill probably wouldn’t do is talk about coming out as pansexual and non-binary at the age of 48, as Currie does, although he tosses the ideas into the mix in a pretty superficial way: there’s very little impression given of what they mean for him.

With his funnel of nonsense set to full blast, he deluges the audience with explosions, screaming and musical stings, showering us with confetti, and spewing milk and cornflakes in our faces. The front half of this audience is having the night of its life, especially during the strobe-lit bread fight, which is a clear highlight. His show must be an absolute nightmare to clean up after. In the back half of Just the Tonic’s main room, some sequences are lost, particularly moments where he sits down or comes into the audience.

So with the vast energy he’s generating in about 80 per cent of the audience, it’s left to me to figure out why I’m not feeling it. Is it rude to say it feels like an older man’s absurdity? Nothing wrong with that, but there’s something a bit pre-Boosh about the language of his imagination, like when he’s in character shrieking ‘I’m Strawberry Peter’ or when he puts on lipstick on and holds a slice of bread to each ear to sing ‘lady in bread’. It’s kind of cute, but it feels trapped in the earliest enclosures of surrealism.

Currie brings a wild-and-crazy punk propulsion to his performance that seems intended to catalyse the wackiness, but some brains are going to interpret it as the kind of forced fun you get from all-inclusive holiday kids’ clubs. 

There’s a bit at the end where he gets the whole audience to stand up and join in on a mime, and tells us while we rise that ‘if you don’t do this you have no soul’. I’m already on my feet but I’ve never felt my enthusiasm for an idea dissipate so quickly. It’s a knee-jerk, childish thought, but I’m wondering who made Paul Currie the arbiter of whether we have souls? There’s a reason absurdity doesn’t usually come with a value judgement. If the idea is fun and interesting, won’t we want to join in anyway?

In the final tally, it’s impossible not to acknowledge that the audience’s joy filled the room much more than my scepticism. Statistically, there’s a good chance his spirit will move you. For the rest of us, though, I think it’s okay to want more from our nonsense.

• Paul Currie: The Chorus of Ghosts Living In My Skull Keep Telling Me To Take A Shit In The Fruit Salad is on at Just The Tonic at the Caves at 9pm.