Comedians are a weird bunch but few are quite as weird as Simon Munnery.

While some comics give the impression they have honed their oddness in front of a mirror, Munnery looks and sounds like the real deal.

He probably thinks he's normal.

The creator of League Against Tedium and Alan Parker Urban Warrior brought us a one-man play on the subject of buckets, more specifically the wearing of buckets on heads.

Bucket Head is set in the "near near future", where bucket wearing has become a considered response to the absurdities of modern living.

On stage Munnery donned buckets of different styles and colours and was variously transformed into a tambourine maker on his way to visit a naked librarian in a field; a paranoid communist and leader of a guerrilla army called the Teleban; and a brightyellow bucket-wearing investigator who takes to reciting philosophical insights from a stretch of red ribbon concealed inside a ball which doubles up as a purse.

And to think there was a time when a couple of mother-in-law jokes and an innuedo would have sufficed.

Bucket Head was an often enjoyable mix of existential analogy and pretentious nonsense; a carnival of surrealism punctuated with some wonderful one-liners.

Surely the best comedy makes you ponder, at least a little, and Munnery's material was an island of ideas.

For those who did not care so much for the clever stuff there were plenty of laughs to be had watching a fully-grown man trying to address an audience from beneath a bucket.

After the interval Munnery treated the crowd to some stand-up, which turned out to be conventional only to the extent that no buckets were involved.

"Anyone from anywhere? Anyone do anything for a living? Anyone ever noticed anything?" It was the perfect introduction to a series of routines which, given his surrealist tendencies, were surprisingly heavy on personal anecdote.

From his medical flirtation with methadone ("quite moreish, as I discovered") to an apparently true story about the theft of Freddie Mercury's birthday cake, Munnery revealed the man behind the bucket and the audience liked him.

Perhaps some editing could have pared down stretches of the baggier material to its comic core and filled some of the silences with extra laughs.

But efficiency and genius rarely come in pairs and sensible people will be content to embrace Munnery's madness.