Anyone expecting brevity to form part of the soul of Ken Campbell's wit clearly has never attended one of his shaggy-dog, one-man perambulations.
However, two hours 40 minutes is pushing his luck, even by the standards of the man famous for a 22-hour epic called The Warp. As a result, there will always be those who, like one man in last night's audience, sleep soundly through his shows while others around him roar with laughter.
Contrary to the title's suggestion, this is less a history lesson and more a rambling reminiscence triggered by a trip to a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky. Among many digressions, this sets up a doomed liaison with the sister of two childhood friends known to Campbell as the "Greater and Lesser Plashwits".
He also expounds on such subjects as "gastromancy" (the art of sucking voice through the anus) and "glossolalia" (the spiritual equivalent of ventriloquism: speaking in tongues).
But in a tide of free-range capering, there is everything here from a card trick played with sausages to discourses on Eskimo glue sniffers. The point of it all might be said to break through what Campbell calls "the wall in the brain which prevents us from seeing the arbitrary nature of everything", a realisation he claims can be so funny it can kill. But the truth is there isn't really any point to Campbell's loony musings. More than anything, they are simply a celebration of a deeply eccentric love of nonsense - providing an opportunity to regress into a world of pure, imbecilic imagination.
Campbell is a kind of Shakespearean fool proudly touting the head of a ventriloquist's dummy or "knee pal" modelled on his own face, complete with winged eyebrows and popping eyeballs. But his unique nasal Cockney twang needs few gimmicks and, padding about in an old T-shirt and scruffy trousers in the company of three dogs, he is a very daft and very crafty performer.
He revisits material from old shows, touching on universal theories of everything, but his ramblings are mostly as original as his mad genius. The pity is, his long-windedness loses parts of his audience to sleep or the streets outside.
Until Saturday, 9 September. Box office: 020 7452 3000.
Ken Campbell's History of Comedy
