As part of Dave’s Brighton Comedy Festival, Jon Richardson presents a show of stand-up, startlingly well over a hour, and coming complete with an interval, usually the preserve of much more established, or at least older comics.

He earns it, however. It’s never boring, and he’s as engaging a presence as you’d hope a young white male comic to be. Usually, however, a stand-up show that feels the need to take a break is presided over by a comic that you could pick out of a line-up of all the other young white male comics, and it’s difficult to identify right away what sets Richardson apart from the rest.

It would be unfair to claim that Jon Richardson has an odd laugh. Unfair, and numerically inaccurate, since if this night proves anything, he’s got at least twenty-eight entirely different strange barks, guffaws, and yelps of snickering. This, particularly when it appears to be a spontaneous reaction to something unexpected, is an attractive quality.

He doesn’t seem entirely sure yet what sort of persona he wants to put across on stage: the occasional masturbation gag is to be expected from his ilk, but there’s the whisper of something stronger here. By far the most successful routine is a passage discussing proto-feminist re-workings of familiar fairy tales. At times he tells us of upset and worry – the line about his reaction to the end of his last relationship is his best gag, but it’s really his only reference to what you sense is a whole wealth of great material. At other times, he comes across as far too assured and confident to really justify the pathetic life he’s trying to sell us, such as his OCD-drenched attention to cleanliness.

In the end, the reason why it feels as disjointed as it does is written on the top of the poster: this is the greatest hits – clearly a patchwork quilt of all the best bits of material that Richardson has been working these past few years, meaning that the links between, and expansions of, various themes, feel exactly like what they likely are: extracts from various other sets.

It’s more of a joy when he appears to come off script – near the end, it’s like watching someone suffer a massive nervous collapse in the name of comedy – with a darker comic waiting, appropriately enough, in the shadows. You get the impression that if Jon Richardson worried less about the audience liking him, he’d have them eating out of his hand. Which, no doubt, would be spotless.

Performed on Sunday 7th October 2012 at Brighton Dome.

> Visit the official Dave’s Brighton Comedy Festival website for full details and bookings.